I Remember the Day I First Came to America
I remember the day I first came to America. I was in the LAX airport, looking around the totally strange place which was full of strangers. All I could hear was the strangers' buzzing. At that moment, I realized that I was in America, and my heart started to beat fast.
Until April 25, 2006 I had never been away from my country, Korea. For 18 years, I had grown up being around people who used the same language as me and had black hair and brown eyes. I was having.... However, my mother wanted to give me and my little brother more chances in our education and lives. One day she grabbed a huge Nursing book written all in English, telling us she would restart her career in America. It was at her age of 48 after being a housewife for 11 years after quitting her career as a nurse. Sometimes I saw her fallen asleep with the huge book and a pen in her hands and glasses on her face. A year later, she really passed the RN exam, and that is how my mother, brother, and I came to the U.S.
Above all, language barrier was the biggest issue. First a few weeks, I was like a breathing statue who could not talk. I blushed like a tomato even before I opened my mouth. It was not only because of my poor English but also because of my lack of confidence. The first day in College of Marin, the lecture sounded like, "Let's,, blah ..you.. and blah blah.." From the next day, I recorded the lectures and listened to them at home. Also, I used to "draw" the teacher's cursive note on my notebook and spent time at home to figure out what it meant. At night, I watched movies like Spider Man with English subtitle and dictionary beside me.
Gradually the strangers' buzzing became words, and later on it finally became successive sentences to my ears. I could laugh at teacher's joke with my classmates. It took days and days for me to get English papers done and read text books for my exams, but my hard work and time I spent were rewarded by all A's in my transcript. Simple words are not enough to
Until April 25, 2006 I had never been away from my country, Korea. For 18 years, I had grown up being around people who used the same language as me and had black hair and brown eyes. I was having.... However, my mother wanted to give me and my little brother more chances in our education and lives. One day she grabbed a huge Nursing book written all in English, telling us she would restart her career in America. It was at her age of 48 after being a housewife for 11 years after quitting her career as a nurse. Sometimes I saw her fallen asleep with the huge book and a pen in her hands and glasses on her face. A year later, she really passed the RN exam, and that is how my mother, brother, and I came to the U.S.
Above all, language barrier was the biggest issue. First a few weeks, I was like a breathing statue who could not talk. I blushed like a tomato even before I opened my mouth. It was not only because of my poor English but also because of my lack of confidence. The first day in College of Marin, the lecture sounded like, "Let's,, blah ..you.. and blah blah.." From the next day, I recorded the lectures and listened to them at home. Also, I used to "draw" the teacher's cursive note on my notebook and spent time at home to figure out what it meant. At night, I watched movies like Spider Man with English subtitle and dictionary beside me.
Gradually the strangers' buzzing became words, and later on it finally became successive sentences to my ears. I could laugh at teacher's joke with my classmates. It took days and days for me to get English papers done and read text books for my exams, but my hard work and time I spent were rewarded by all A's in my transcript. Simple words are not enough to