Personal Narrative: I Am An US

Studying in a foreign country is an interesting experience of an individual lifetime. One tends to learn a number of things relating to ways of life in a foreign land. Social, political and economic values and aspects are usually different from one region to another. Therefore, through studying abroad one is able to learn different issues about another society such as gender and sexuality issues, social class and race/ethnicity issues. Having come from a developing country studying in the U.S.A has been a great experience personally. This paper will attempt to provide a reflection of my personal experience on studying in the U.S by comparing the history of Angola and the U.S.

Growing up in Ghana, I had heard a lot of things about the U.S. This was a country I had always wanted to visit; my prayer was answered when I got the opportunity to travel there. Arriving in a new environment came with many experiences. Adjusting with food, language and the weather was not easy. With the passage of time, however I have been able to0 adjust and fit it. This write-up therefore is to elaborate on my experiences since coming to U.S.

We made it to America finally although the trip he was hard I am honored to finally be in an important country.

Moving to the United States is a huge step for an immigrant. As an international student, I have been passing through this event that most Brazilian desire to. However, it is hard to adapt with the new culture and lifestyle, knowing that I have my own values. The “Two Ways to Belong in America” illustrates two views of getting used with this new culture, in which I identified myself with one of these ways: my nationality cannot be change with a simple paper called green card. Thus, starting a new life in a foreign country is tough because I have to find a way to readjust to this new culture, not ignoring

I wasn’t born in the U.S. like most of the people of my age were. I was born in Mexico, Autlan Jalisco, to be exact and was brought to the U.S. when I was only nine months old. As I was growing up I got to the age of ten where babies and kids who were younger than me started to grab my attention. The way they interact with people and how they act in general made me realize I had a passion for taking care of younger people than me and just having the opportunity to help them out in like feeding them or changing diapers made me happy. Apparently it didn’t appeal the eyes of my father he would always yell at me infront of people or after we left someone house who had kids he would say, “I don’t want you holding the kids of other people or taking

Living in America gives us many freedoms and many blessings. I started my life in the Ukraine. This situation or circumstances I do not know. I came to America when I was 18 months old. A nice family, who lived in America, changed my life by adopting me. Being an

Years before I found a home in my mother’s swollen belly, my identity had already been conceived by both violence and beauty—two emotions which made love on the war-torn pages of immigrant stories collected on my parents’ spines. As a child, the contents of these stories transported me back to our native Afghanistan, where Soviet bombs converted my mother and father from citizens to refugees—strangers on their own soil. Running my fingers through the pages, I felt the blisters on my father’s hands and verses from the Quran on my mother’s lips as they pieced together the fragments of our home and restored a new life for me and my siblings in the United States. Years later in what was the beginning of a lifelong struggle with my identity, I closed

Living in the United States shaped my character. When I was young my family moved from refugee. In the beginning life was tough getting adjusted to the american life. At a young age I understood that some people looked down upon me because of my background. I had a hard time getting along with other students because of cultural clash. After a while I was able to understand the American culture. My mom was a single parent with six other children and the only place we could find to live in was a neighborhood that was not safe. My mother would never allow us to go outside because she was afraid that we would get in trouble. It was not until college that I was able to understand all I was missing out in the world.

An anonymous poet once said “ABC and NBC do not weep” and “as blood drips from my television screen onto my living room floor, but I walk around it.” This powerfully speaks to the desensitization of the American society, and to twenty-first-century society as a conglomeration. Every night's millions of us sit down to watch some crime series such as Criminal Minds or NCIS. These shows give society a fractured, disjointed account of the justice system and law enforcement, but they also cause us to become comfortable with the idea of murder and a broken justice in a way, “[the] blood drips from [our] television screen onto [our] living room floor[s], but [we] walk around it,” masking the horror and rationalizing it. I have fallen victim to this

As my family and I were driving in the car, I saw a sign that said something about being an American. I thought to myself, isn’t everyone an American that lives in America?

Being new in U.S gave the opportunity to start a new life with new, and hopefully, better opportunities. But it also implies to start from zero, from the bottom have nothing. Sleeping on the floor without television, without a cellphone and trying to find a good taste to the food from here made me feel like a prisoner in a nice jail.

Through recent years I have come to a realization in life, with the gift of observation, the situations life has thrown at me has helped me understand what my role here in America is. As a fellow American, I have found purpose in providing help to others when they face the struggles of life I, too, have had to face. As life carries on, my responsibility to America is to use my experiences and gathered wisdom to help others, to teach them, lead them, and inspire them.

I remember grouping myself as only American thinking it was my birthright, and told my parents things like: "You should let me live like the other kids and give me allowance! It's not fair I just want to do normal things!" I looked different from the other kids at school but the cultural aspect was bigger than the racial aspect to me. I was too young to really grasp the implications then, and no one really talked about it to me. My grandparents lived with me for a while as a young child, and I grew up speaking Chinese at home. At preschool I started speaking English outside of home, and around this time they went back to China. In Kindergarten and later, I steadily spoke less and less Chinese at home - I had little incentive to keep learning due to lack of relatives who only spoke Chinese - and I felt the best way to develop and fit in at school was to learn English well.

This is what I think defines an American. I didn’t at first know what to write because I am not from America. It costed me much time, because I within 15 days here and I can not say much about it because Americans do not know much. I tried to do the best I can do. Well, talk about freedom of expression (the part that cost me more than writing) how it is in America, what are the differences with Catalonia and the opportunity to get more work here than elsewhere. The first thing that will speak as an American, the second thing is the freedom of speech in America and the third had the opportunity to work.

Am from American background. I have amazing family orientation which have a great value. My family does have an influence on an individual’s values and expectation. My patents shape who I am today because they are my role models. When I am growing I have an extremely strong work ethic. When I’m working on a project, I don’t want just to completing my ahead of time. My weakness is to wait until the last minute to set appointments at work. I always find it difficult to prioritize me self. Time management is a very big challenging with my school work.