A Quote by Yvonne Orji

'First Gen' is kind of the ode to my parents and to really all immigrant children who come here with kind of a preemptive expectation placed on them, and then they get there, and they realize the American dream is bigger than, sometimes, what our parents dreamt.
Soccer was the first sport that my parents put me in, and ultimately, all the parents kind of came over to my mom and were, 'We think Channing would be better at football.... We love him, he's really great, but he's kind of hurting our children.' I was just a little wild.
Immigrant parents dream that their children will find a place in their new home, and they willingly suffer hardships in service to that dream. That was certainly true of my parents.
It's important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful. Good parents are the hardest to get rid of.
You must learn to look at people who are angry with you straight in the eye without getting angry back. When children see their parents treating them this way, they then recognize the parents' authority. It speaks louder than words. Their new respect for the parents is as good for them as it is for the parents. It never works to demand respect of children. It must be given willingly as a result of strength of good character in the parents, which is manifested by their non-reaction to stress in the children.
I've always assumed that my parents and my in-laws would live with me when I get older and have children. I just assume it will happen and that it's the right way to do things. It's a deeply Indian custom - that you kind of inherit your parents and your spouse's parents and you take care of them eventually.
I loved to sing and dance and play-act, and I always believed that my dream to become an actor would come true because my immigrant parents had taught me to believe in the American dream.
We are all very deeply the children of our parents and their parents. Far more than we generally realize.
People talked about being a parent, or being a mother or a father. We don't talk about "wiving" our husbands or "friending" our friends, or "childing" our parents. We just talk about being in a relationship with those people. You don't measure whether your marriage was good based on whether or not your husband is better now than he was 10 years ago, or whether your friend is richer than when they first became your friend. The relationships between parents and children is a kind of love, rather than a kind of work.
Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it makes you a translator: there are all kinds of things that American parents know about life in America ,and about being a kid in America, that non-American parents don't know, and in many cases it falls on the kid to tell them, and also to field questions from Americans about their parents' native country.
Parents can ruin children, and sometimes that's a learned behavior. Sometimes you can't blame your parents for it, sometimes you can. I think to me, that's what the whole paradox is, is people that have children that don't even know how to raise them.
What kind of country are we, to participate in separating mothers and fathers from their children? Right now we have," and whatever the number is, "800,000 children 15 and under who've arrived in our country in the last two years, and where are their parents? We have not let them come in. And we can't deport them. Why send them back to the hellholes?
Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.
We've got the best kind of parents for us, in this situation. My parents are super supportive of me and really into our band. They get just as excited as we do, about stuff that we do. So, it's pretty cool.
I think, with my cartoons, the parent-like figures are kind of my own archeypes of parents, and they're taken a little bit from my parents and other people's parents, and parents I have read about, and parents I dreamed about, and parents that I made up.
My family are very supportive and always have been. They weren't the kind of parents that pushed me into it. I know a lot of parents of kid actors I've worked with have pressured them into acting, but my parents are different. I'm really lucky to have them because they let me make my own decisions.
I think the biggest difference is that I've noticed Western parents seem much more concerned about their children's psyches, their self-esteem, whereas tough immigrant parents assume strength rather than fragility in their children and therefore behave completely differently.
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