I've always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I've heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.
We live in a very different world than the one that we inherited from our parents and from our grandparents. Times are changing, and states must adapt to win.
Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.
A woman's body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother's, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went into and out of it, and as I grew up, I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself.
I remember trying to be funny, and both of my parents were terribly funny. My father was also very dignified, but my mother was an absolute ding-a-ling, a ripper.
I'm a diligent person, and that came directly from having hardworking parents.
I watched my parents' fame diminish - as I was getting more conscious, their celebrity was going back down the mountain.
My parents divorced, my brothers and I ended up living with my mother, and we were living with the choice of heating or eating. My mum was working, but she needed financial support to make ends meet. I had to have free school dinners and free school uniforms.
As a kid, I was pretty obsessed with dinosaurs and the day that my parents took me to Dinosaur National Park, I didn't think life could get any better.
Once you succeed at what you're doing, your parents see that what you were doing wasn't so bad after all, though they'd prefer to see you in a secure lifestyle where you have a contract for years and years, or you have a diploma or degree.
Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine.
My parents said, Oh, he's going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.
My parents worked their tails off, but we weren't the poorest people in town. Some people I went to school with, you could tell they were dirt poor.
My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.
My parents were fantastic. I was an only child, so I had a lot of love and too much attention. I don't think I was spoilt. My mother was quite a disciplinarian, but I did have a lot of attention and quite a lot of pressure to do well at whatever I was doing.
Adoptive parents are taking on enormous responsibility, both emotionally and financially. Quite frankly, they need as much disclosure as possible about the child's background and health to assure the best fit and be prepared.
Parents should not smoke in order to discourage their kids from smoking. A child is more likely to smoke when they have been raised in the environment of a smoker.
In many Asian households, to not go on to higher education, that's like a big no-no. I know my parents' discouragement was for my own protection, and I'm really close to them now, but they didn't understand that there is value in this. That's because they didn't know.
My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.
My parents, especially my father, discussed the question of my brothers' education as a matter of real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely discussed at all.
