A Quote by Joel Kinnaman
In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.
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I feel lucky. I grew up in an open-minded, multi-cultural community in West Vancouver in Canada. There were people who had escaped some kind of oppression. Some of them were first-generation immigrants, others were one or two generations back.
When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.
When I was at university, there was such a strong delineation between city kids and those who had grown up the suburbs. City kids were so at home in the world, in a way that suburban kids take years to catch up, if indeed they ever can.
My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.
I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.
There were six kids in our family, and I grew up fast. I had to do a lot of things on my own. I was a rebellious teenager. That's why coming into the film business was good for me because it gave me some discipline. Once I became an actor, I had to grow up a little more.
I learned Spanish as my second language from middle school through high school. I grew up volunteering at homeless shelters and tutoring kids of Latin immigrants in Atlanta, who didn't speak any English. That prepared me for when I traveled.
I'm first generation American, and my parents were both from Nigeria. And so I always say that I'm literally an African American. So my last name is Famuyiwa, it's different. And so that was a part of my experience from people not being able to pronounce it to not sort of having sort of a shared, common history with a lot of the kids that I was growing up with because my parents were from Africa.
I grew up bilingual, I grew up speaking Chinese in the home, Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and I learned English because I was born and raised in the U.S. That really gave me an edge. I understand that, from the experts, if you grew up bilingual, your brain kind of gets wired to accept a new language. It was a very serious deal because not only did I have to learn Russian to a high degree in order to function as a necessary member of the crew, but also I knew that the Russians that came over that made an effort and had some success in learning English, those were the folks we trusted.
When I went to school, I didn't know a lick of English, but it was okay because there were so many immigrants in the area, a lot of the kids didn't speak a lick of English, either. It was normal to have a wicked accent.
Anyone who grew up in the crack era - you know, I grew up in that era - knew that there were also people out - and there are still guys to this day that are out there, you know, obviously drug dealing - but those were the guys who had access and had money. And some of those guys felt responsible to create opportunity for other people and were also aware of the dangers of their work and often aren't really the ones that are encouraging kids to get into drug dealing.
I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.
I was born in Niagara Falls. The high school I went to had 500 kids and the school didn't have a lot of money. The town itself was whatever. It was a good place to grow up. It was a blessing that I grew up there, because I got to find myself at a young age.
I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.
Technology is something you have to embrace because technology is part of our generation. Digital natives, for instance, are people who grew up in a world that always had the Internet and who always had smartphones. Millennials aren't too far behind: my generation of people, who were in the mix of the Internet when it first came out.
After my parents' divorce in the early seventies, I grew up with my mother, who wasn't super educated herself. But there were a lot of kids from the subcontinent in the neighbourhood, many of whom were academic achievers. So my sister and I grew up around them, and both of us did well in school.
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