Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother's sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents' college alumni associations.
Colleges prefer to enroll wealthy students because they know it's more likely that they'll pay for full tuition without needing financial aid. They're also more likely to have parents who will donate large sums of money to the school. When the privileged students graduate, they're expected to join the alumni association and also donate cash.
My sister would write plays, and I would act in them and perform them for my parents. They were on the comedy side, very much inspired by 'The Amanda Show.'
I said that my parents had come from India. They thought America was a place where people were treated equally, and their kids would have an amazing life.
We can either be governed by fear - fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, call the press the enemy of the people, tear kids away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border - or we can be governed by our ambitions and our aspirations and our desire to make the most out of all of us. And that's America at its best.
When I was around eleven or twelve, my board got hung up on the top of a bowl, and I got a concussion, and I knocked my teeth out. That was the first time that I got seriously injured, and I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and my parents briefly doubted.
Remember: the ratings system is a voluntary infringement of First Amendment rights, an uneasy bargain between the needs of parents, the needs of artists, and the needs of large media corporations to make profits. Any time we chip away at the First Amendment, we should at least do it with some reverence.
You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.
I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.
It is pretty amazing. My parents, who came from Nicaragua to the U.S. - who would have thought that they would have American kids on the Olympic team? I think that's the epitome of the Olympic dream.
When I tell French parents that I know lots of American kids who will eat only pasta or only white rice, they can't believe it. I mean, they can understand how the kid left to his own devices might do that, but they can't imagine that parents would allow that to happen.
My father didn't do a lot of direct education. My mother was the direct educator. She would put on these movies on American Movie Classics when we got cable, after my parents got divorced, which took like four or five years.
My parents didn't feel that they had any choice but to leave the Dominican Republic. They did, however, choose to become Americans, and they lived American values every day.
My parents instilled a lot of American values in me. They encouraged me to work hard and told me that anything was possible for me because I was a citizen.
For dinner I want real sushi - not the Americanized kind. My parents are American Samoan so I don't go for any of those rolls. I'll have raw prawn or sea urchin or octopus. I love it.
We grew up Amish, but my parents left the religion when I was a child. The Amish have lots of rules, and my dad thought many people in the faith were hypocritical because they'd tell others not to do something and then do it themselves.
However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.
You know, we were worried that in the UK, there's no anarchy on kids TV. When we grew up kids TV was very anarchic and it was about stuff that your parents would probably object to, if they got to object. And it's gotten very safe.
Google is one of the most incredible breakthroughs that we have today. Yes, it can scare a lot of patients, thinking we're all dying because we look up something on Google. But there's also a lot of anecdotal information from parents, firsthand accounts of what they did for their own child.
My parents would watch movies like 'Big' and 'Freaky Friday,' and I wanted to see that kind of story told from an African-American angle. So I had the idea for 'Little,' and then I told my parents, and we all fleshed it out together.