A Quote by Peter van Agtmael
I realized how little I knew about my own country. I had grown up in the suburbs and, after college, I moved out of the country, so I didn't really know the place well. When I started following soldiers and their families back home, it provoked a lot of the questions about who we are as a nation, questions I realized couldn't be explored through the more limited framework of looking at the military at war and at home.
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Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.
I moved back home after graduating from Virginia Tech. And that's when reality hit. I knew I had to do something. I guess it doesn't click when you're that young. I was 19 and had finished college. I got home and had to figure out what I was going to do.
I wrote the script to 'Lady Bird,' and it really came out of a desire to make a project about home - like, what the meaning of home is, and place. I knew Sacramento very well, obviously, growing up there, and I felt like the right way to tell a story of a place was through a person who's about to leave it.
When 'American Born Chinese' started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn't really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut.
Even though I'd been invited to the combine, I didn't test particularly well. That didn't really surprise me, I had I no expectation that I'd shock people with an insane 40 time. But I knew things weren't looking good when I started getting asked a lot of questions about the size of my hands.
I ended up going to college for visual arts but moved up to New York after I graduated from college in 2006 and started going gung ho to the Upright Citizens Brigade, and I realized that that was what I was really interested in and what I really wanted to do.
As we've grown as a country, we've allowed our fears and our doubts and our questions about things that we don't know to become more divisive than uniting us as a country, as a people.
I realized through my personal travels how little I know about certain conflicts, because I was too vain or self-absorbed to ask the questions. That's been the focus while I'm in my thirties - to become an accomplished woman, rather than some actress.
I’ve stopped war reporting. I realized that I’d answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
The great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries did not think that epistemological questions floated free of questions about how the mind works. Those philosophers took a stand on all sorts of questions which nowadays we would classify as questions of psychology, and their views about psychological questions shaped their views about epistemology, as well they should have.
In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from.
My life changed at the age of 27. I was doing well professionally and had just got out of a serious relationship. I suddenly realized that I had reached a low in my life, be it spiritually or emotionally, and started asking a lot of questions - beyond just career and relationships.
I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.
I think I'm still just as conflicted about the war as I always was. On the one hand, I was a soldier carrying out his duty, following his allegiance to his country and to the mission at hand. But yet, there was always this unease plaguing me. "What are we doing here?" "Are we really fixing this country or are we doing more harm than good?" And the most pressing question: "How do we pull ourselves out of this quicksand?" I think I'm still there in that white space you mentioned, trying to get clarity for myself on what this war did to us as a nation.
I think when I first started out making music here in Los Angeles, a lot of people were really curious about my ethnicity, and you know, whatever questions they had, I'd be more than happy to answer them.
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