My Experience In My Life

My move from South Korea to the United States was to this day the hardest, most stressful event of my whole entire life. At the age of six, I gave up the comfort of my friends, culture, and home to move to a country halfway across the world. Korea was everything I knew and loved. Having never set foot outside of the country, all my dreams and aspirations were set in Korea. Although I was a fickle child and my goals changed constantly, they all were intertwined with Korea. I was going to become a pianist in Korea and teach piano to students. Another time, I decided I was going to become a math teacher at the school I was attending. My view of the world was limited, but I was happy in my familiar, safe place. My move to America changed my whole perspective.

Three months ago I was studying my last moments of high school in Mexico. I had already planned the university I was going to and the major I wanted to course. Everything was happening really fast when my father told my mother and I that he had a job opportunity in the United States. He didn't wish to force us to go with him, although we did accept to leave because both of us consider that the most valuable thing in this world is family.

My family’s euphoria refueled our motivation to chase the American Dream. I finally started kindergarten after 5 months in the United States. I had already finished kindergarten in Mexico, but due to my birthday being after August and because I was yet to learn to write and speak English, I was forced to repeat kindergarten. I was learning to speak English at a surprising rate. Everything was going more smoothly for the family. Although not as an electrician, my father found a job and I helped him with some of the English I knew to fill out applications and communicate with people. I finally started to feel that life in the U.S might be worth

I am a Chinese immigrant, and I have been New York six years already. In here, I spend lots of time to learn English and adapt the cultures. Even my language is not as good as a native speaker, but I still want to be an American here. Therefore, I am planning to become a US citizen within two years, before I graduate college. In this six years, I started from learning alphabetical in high school. Because of my language problem, I didn’t have a good GPA in high school. It made me upset. After I graduate high school, I didn’t go to college, because I thought, even I went to college at that time, I won’t have good score and achievement. I won’t spend too much time and concentrated on study. Therefore, in the year after I graduated, I went to

Moving my whole life to the United States was a special challenge to me. I had to be familiar with life style, environment, education system, culture, and tradition which are different from my country Iraq. Before I moved to the United States, I spent three years in a university in Iraq; however, these years in the university did not help me to get to the college level in the United States. It was like I needed to start from zero. I did not give up because I have a goal to be a doctor. Therefore, I took ESOL classes, passed Texas Admission Test, and now I am in my Junior year.

In 2004, my family emigrated to America from Pakistan. Our lives in Pakistan were better than most. We lived in a huge condo and my father owned a plant nursery which earned him enough money to support us. However, my parents wanted their kids to have a better future and become something great one day. This wasn’t really possible in Pakistan; the education system wasn’t great and it wasn’t safe either. Because of this, we emigrated to America so my siblings and I could achieve the American dream through proper education. Little did I know that my life would drastically change.

In order to come to America for school, I either had to have a student visa or a permanent residency, for which someone had to sponsor me. I was actually starting to give up on coming to the USA for School. But one day I saw a mail from the USA embassy, and in the mail it said that my aunt sponsored me to come to the USA, and they asked me along with my family for an interview. It was so unexpected that I didn’t know how to react. I took the letter to my dad, and he told me all about how he was processing the whole time while I was busy taking my finals. That was exciting because I was actually going to get a chance to study abroad which was all depending on the interview. I had to prepare for the interview with my best effort because that could take my life up to a whole new level. The interview was in the capital

For me, coming to the America is one of my great decisions which I’ve made in my life. In Vietnam, I lived happily with my mother and my brother for 25 years. However, for my brighter future, I had to leave my beloved family to come to the U.S. to join my father and continue to study. Everythings has changed. I have to overcome my obstacles such as new environment and language barrier to adapt new life in the U.S. Thanks to my father, he gave me useful advice to live and study.

However, I just realized that I literally couldn’t do that when it came to a study abroad fair taking place in my high school. As a class monitor, I was put in a priority to be arranged to do an English placement test for high school students with no-cost. If my result was above the standard score, I would get a full scholarship to study in the US as an exchange student for one year. My aspiration had been again raising up until the day I received the result. I was the student who got the highest score among over 400 contestants, it was such a most surprising news ever to me. However, it was also the worst day ever in my entire life. I came home with a sense of excitement and smiles appearing on my face during the way home. That was not an ending of a day as happy as the Korean romantic dramas, I showed the result to my parents, immediately, my father said “No” as if he was the judge in American Got Talents saying to contestants who failed at their performance. Yes, “No” meant that I wouldn’t be allowed to get that scholarship and had to stay in Vietnam to continue my study, graduate and enter a well-known Vietnamese college. I feel like everything in the sky was falling down onto my head after hearing that word. All my effort one more time was thrown away. A bunch of negative thoughts had begun coming out into my mind. Without any responses, I went to my room in silence and torn down all my American stuff,

In 2010, my life had a dramatic change. My parents told me that I would immigrate to the U.S. At that time, I felt lost. I wondered what the future would be like and what obstacles I would face. Yet, this feeling was faded away soon when I saw the beautiful night scenes of countries that the airplane passed. I learned that there were many things that I have never seen. Immigrating to another country would give me an opportunity to discover and explore more new things. Yet, life was hard for the first several months in the U.S. I needed to speak English and face a completely new environment. Although it took me 30 minutes to read a single page of textbook, I opened the

From my earliest memory, my life in the Philippians was surrounded with joy. I was born

It was the 2000s. I had been without a job for at least a couple of weeks and was finding it extremely hard to carry out my life in my village in Veracruz, Mexico. I used to own a farm but when the temperature began to rise and the soil was less fertile, I had to put an end to it because I was unable to plant or harvest any crops. In the past, this had been my main source of income but as the time went by, I could not sustain this lifestyle anymore. Furthermore, I couldn’t supply my family of 4 with the items they needed to be alive. After having a long talk with my wife, Emilia, I decided to begin to consider many different options. We searched all of the village and even in nearby towns trying to find a place that would hire me. We didn’t find anything but did see a flyer on a pole that was interesting. It said, “Go to America. You’ll get hired for sure.” Me and my wife were overjoyed when we saw this. We immediately began to plan our move up North.

My childhood is filled with memories of my sister being my rock. We were best friends and she mothered me when our own mother couldn’t. We were both dealing with the same troubles and nice to share the experience with someone who understood the situation we were put in. She was also the ONLY one who was positive at the beginning of my pregnancy. I am sure she was also disappointed but she knew I wasn’t ruining my life. She didn’t make me feel like a complete failure. My mom told oldest sister and she led me away to speak alone. She told me how I disappointed her and she was excited to see me go off to college. It became the therapy everyone needed to tell me how much of a disappointment I was to them. However, they never took the time before to encourage me to make a future. After few days, my entire family knew because of a cousin who was untrustworthy. I went from feeling free to dreading family interactions.

For most of my life I had not put much effort into my looks or health. I prided myself with my intelligence but was unhappy with how my body looked. I thought it was silly to be so concerned with my mental strength but not my physical. Until my sophomore year I was overweight and did not have much of a social life.

As time passed, it seemed to fly faster and faster. Soon, it was the summer between my sophomore and junior years and I had an abundance of plans for how to spend my summer. One event stood out compared to all of the others. It would greatly influence my life and shape my thoughts to the way they are today. Reminiscing about the events of my past, my journey to the glamorous mountains of Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico to hike for a week is indisputably the greatest memory of my life so far.