LATINO

I clearly remember arriving in America for the first time when I was five. I was cold and scared. I was cold because it was December and just a few days away from Christmas. I was scared because I had no image of what my parents looked like. My brother and I were raised by our grandparents and relatives in Fujian, China. We were coming to America to reunite with our parents and start in a new environment. Not only was reuniting with our parents awkward for me, it remained awkward for a few weeks. It was like meeting strangers for the first time, but we had to live under the same roof right away in Chinatown Manhattan. I don’t remember the ice breaker or whether there were any for us, but what I do remember is having multiple babysitters because both my parents had to work and my brother had school. As soon as I was old enough to attend school, I was placed in a bi-lingual school a few blocks away from my house where I took English class for one half of the day and Chinese class for the other half. In my household, we spoke Mandarin, a dialect of Chinese. While I attended school, many of the kids that I met and became friends with spoke Cantonese, another dialect of Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, I slowly picked up Cantonese and as much of English as I possibly could. By the time my parents decided to move to the Bronx, I was fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, but I still needed help in English. Moving to the Bronx was almost like coming to America. The environment was entirely different and the friends that I had made in Chinatown were all gone. I was starting fresh again, but this time my parents were also experiencing the same thing. I started second grade and was automatically placed in an ESL class. Even in an ESL class, I felt misplaced almost as if my level of knowledge was still below everybody else’s. I recall being stared at like an animal behind bars at a zoo. I couldn’t fully communicate with anybody because of my lack of English. After multiple