It was in October of 2009 when I got on a plane and landed in New York. When I got off the plane, I thought that I had done something pretty cool, since I went on a plane for the first time and almost none of the kids at my preschool had ever been on a plane before. However, I immediately took back this thought the moment we left the airport because we had to take a 6-hour car ride right after our 16-hour plane trip in order to get from New York to Quincy, Massachusetts. As a 5-year-old, I obviously wasn’t going to sleep during the plane ride or the car ride and this ended up playing out horribly for me. When we got to the apartment we rented, none of the furniture was set up yet so we had to stand while we ate our food and spent 3 hours building furniture. I was super tired by that point and I remember that I ended up almost falling asleep leaning onto a wall.

Despite the fact that my first day in the United States wasn’t as comfortable as I hoped it would be, I still thought that this little adventure we were on was interesting and could be fun. However, everything changed the instant that I was sent to school. School felt like a living hell for me at the time. I didn’t know anybody and there was nobody that I could talk to because nobody understood me, and I didn’t understand any of them. I still remember one of the worst incidents related to my language barrier: I wanted to go to the bathroom. The problem: I didn’t know how to say this in English. It ended very poorly for me.

This incident caused me to hate school so much that I would cry every single morning before going, and my mother literally had to drag me there each day. But like many things in life, the situation eventually got better. This was mainly attributed to the fact that the elementary school that I went to had a lot of Chinese kids that were just like me. This meant that we had a translator who spoke Mandarin, easing my urgency to learn English. I was never really sure if this was a good thing, but because of the large number of Chinese kids at my school, we spoke Mandarin to each other every day, and it took me almost four years to get from ELL to standard English-speaking classes. Thinking back to this, the timing for when I got out of ELL was actually perfect because in the 5th year (4th grade) we took a test that determined if we were allowed to partake in a program called ELC and the ELL students didn’t take it. Taking this test gained me entry to a program that was not available at the middle school that I would have originally attended.

At this new middle school, nobody spoke Mandarin in school and I was exposed to more aspects of American Culture there. Even though I had to start fresh again and meet new people, it was much easier this time since I had learned to speak English already. I also met immigrant students who shared similar experiences. Sometimes, I come across others that have just arrived in America, and it reminds me that anything can and will be better after you make it through the difficult times. It’s just a matter of being able to enjoy what you have and keep going.

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