Personal Narrative Essay : A New Citizen Of London

I lugged my bags up to my room and collapsed onto the bed. It was on the second floor of the house and the window looked out over the backyard that was shadowed by the surrounding forest. The floor was covered in light grey carpet and the wall painted a plain off white. A dark, wooden bed took up most of the room, pale fairy lights haphazardly thrown along the headboard. Two matching bedside tables sat on either side of the bed and an empty desk sat opposite it.

New York is a state where there are big lights and lots of people and busy streets. I live in Brooklyn, New York and I was born here and I have lived here all my life. Personally, where I live I can walk to go get groceries that I need and everything is in walking distance. I take the public subway or the bus to get to school and there are many public schools here in Brooklyn, New York. There are delis and corner stores almost around every block. Here in Brooklyn, it is very noisy and busy. I am so used to the noise that I can sleep soundly even with all the noise that surrounds my house. Personally, I think that if I were not born here or was not a New Yorker, I would plan to move here when I get older.

Oddly enough, this illustration begins in an airport bookstore I was rummaging while killing time before a flight in 2004. The store had displayed many softcover books upfront authored by a name I recognized as the Democratic National Convention’s keynote speaker from earlier that year. That man was, at the time, Senator Barack Obama. As it caught my eye, I surveyed the back cover of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and for the first time in my life, I read something that resonated with me at my core. It didn’t have anything to do with public policy or red states and blue states; rather it was his desire to “reconcile his divided inheritance.” He was a black man raised in a white family yet he had traveled to Kenya to face his and his father’s truth. As much of a stretch this may seem, this man’s eloquent story of a struggle to understand and resolve his identity was a truth that I too struggled with and continue to struggle with today.

We all woke up around eight o’clock,then we got up and had some breakfast and we were getting ready to leave. We made sure we had all of our clothing before we left. We did, and then we left. It was a gloomy day there in Florida.Instead of us arriving there,we were leaving

If I was a European thinking about moving to the New World, I would base my decision based off the images and descriptions that were available. One of the images that would deter me from migrating away was a piece of artwork done by Jacques Le Moyne. His picture entails a group of natives who are trying to fight off a fearsome looking alligator. Theodore De Bry describes them plunging a pole into it’s mouth and turning it around so they can stab their stomach. He goes on to say that the natives have to watch out for them day and night because of how frequent they appear. Since I don’t really know how to defend myself against such creatures, I would be afraid to live somewhere where danger is constant. I also would not want to deal with vampire

He looked at me and said thank you doctor. I was volunteering for Give kids a smile at Toto dental when Carlos, walked inside the room that I had set up for him with his mom. As soon as he saw the anesthetic syringe on the table, his first tear broke free and the rest followed in an unbroken stream, he was squeezing his mom’s hand and he was looking at me in fear. I leaned down and started a conversation with him in hopes of making him laugh and comfortable. He stopped crying and smiled wide with his cheeky red face. Can I put you on the chair? I asked. He smiled and said: Only if you would hold my hand and stay right here with me. He was squeezing my hands with all of his powers when the doctor said: we are done, you did a great job Carlos. Without hesitation he looked at me and said thank you doctor and proceeded to give me a hug.

My poor and uneducated mother immigrated to the United States in two thousand one and brought me along at the age of four where she knew I would have a viable opportunity of becoming something more than what our poverty stricken, gang ridden country could offer. My father in a cruel gesture named me Leo without my mother's approval, for he figured a hypocoristic name would allow me, a future illiterate, to at least write my own name. A decade later after experiencing variations of homelessness, hunger, medical conditions, and gunshots outside of our home, my mother remarried, and gave birth to my brother who has been a blessing in disguise. After my mother's short-lived marriage we struggled financially once again; however this time we were

Let me just start off by saying that while stigma about immigrants may lead people to believe that they all have the same story or entered a country the same way, this is not true, we all have our own stories just like everyone else. People do not realize that if people are willing to leave behind everything they’ve ever known in the hope of finding a better life, they are essentially walking the path of the American Dream, the same path the founders of this Nation walked (Sailed, irrelevant to my point). Relations between people of different “races” seem to be fickle, at one point people may get along and then suddenly things change for seemingly no reason. Some may attribute this to life being change, yet there are no moral positives to

Few days after my 8th birthday, my family and I left our home in India and began a new life in Canada. It was not long before, I became aware of how different I was from the other children at school. Not just aesthetically but even our thoughts were different. Steadily, I became isolated and lowered my self-esteemed. At recess one day, the clear skies suddenly changed in the dark clouds with chilling wind. I was shivering in the cold, when one of girls from my class wrapped me inside of her jacket. She was smiling and at me and hugged me and said, “warm”. Soon other kids hugged us and we formed a small huddle. Although they did not know me, they understood the gestures of hugging to provide warmth. Jessica, the girl with the jacket, and

“Take this, and start learning english” is what my sister whilst giving me a book with pictures and english words. My family had recently decided to bring me to Florida. They thought it would be better to go to America knowing some english, rather than none. I never did study the book; learning english as a foreigner without any previous knowledge was a little difficult, for an seven year old.

I was new. No. The world was new. The buildings loomed taller. The colors were duller. The weather was colder. Even the people seemed alien. They moved their mouths and yet the sounds that came out were strange, accented in the wrong places and fluid in others.

It was a hot June day and it has been the hottest I’ve ever felt. At 110 degrees almost everyone looked like zombies withering under the harsh New York sun. The rest of the people were trying their best to wave the heat away with whatever magazine, folding fan, or folder they could find. I was simply chilling inside of an air conditioned city bus. I just got on the bus on Kingsbridge coming from a volunteer service program. However, before I got on the bus I was one of the many people standing at the Kingsbridge stop waiting for the 3 bus. For half an hour, I was trying to hide in the shade from the sun while angrily watching a few ‘NOT IN SERVICE’ buses zoom by. When the bus finally came I practically ran with my metrocard in hand to get

“Hey! Stop that!” giggled May as she hopped off her bed and over to the door. “Come on

You are right. We have to learn to write correctly and sometimes that can be difficult if we do not speak properly. I have to admit; I am guilty of it at times. I come from a small southern town, and at times I find myself using a lot of the southern slang I grew up hearing. I did not realize how much I did it until I started college. It is a hard habit to break at times, but like you said, it is important in the academic world and our professional lives.

Then the 134 arrived. I got on, showed my pass to the bus driver and