Personal Narrative: My Life In Laos

It was the fall of 2003, a cool and cloudless California morning. My parents, who dressed me up with a polo shirt and khakis, waited patiently for the school bus as I looked fearfully at what was going to happen. I didn't want to leave my house, nor did I want to go to school. I was a shy boy, who didn't like doing anything but staying at home and minding my own business. When the school bus finally came, I climbed on to the yellow bus and looked outside fearfully as my parents waved goodbye. I was too scared for the first day of school, which helped me shape the person I am today. Throughout my life, I've been to different places, from Oklahoma to a whole different country in a different continent miles away. During that time, I was able to shape myself with the cultural experiences I got through being in a multicultural environment,

Arriving in a new country was exciting and discomforting. America is a wonderful place to live, which is full of adventure and challenges. I was attracted by the Western culture. Meanwhile, different languages also troubled me. Although I began to learn English in elementary school from ABC, my listening and oral abilities tend not to be adequate. I have to study hard to improve my English, so that I can understand what the people said.

When I was twelve years old, that is first time I came to United States of America to study English alone. At that time,

My family decided to immigrate to America when I was a child, wanting to give my brother and I the opportunity to obtain an education here and lead a better life. However, coming to America, I struggled a lot. As an “outsider,” I did not understand American culture and it took me awhile to learn English. Everything was so much more spacious, so much more modern. Though, despite being a “foreigner” in this new land, my classmates and teachers were very accepting of me, welcoming me with open arms. With their help, and with the help of my family members, I began adapting to life here.

I was born and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. But when I was eight years old, my life transformed completely. I was no longer the smart little girl sitting in front of the class, but the English learner in the back of the classroom. My transition to the United States was not easy. For the first months, I have no friends, no one to sit with at lunch, and most importantly no idea what was going on in class. Even though I had years to learn the language, reaching that goal seem unreachable. However, I slowly improved and each year I had new accomplishments. Even though I have now spent more than half of my life in this country, I will never forget those days in the beginning. The confusion I brought along everywhere I went as I was introduced to a

I cannot imagine growing up in another country. Growing up I only spoke Spanish at home with my parents and brothers. I remember the first day of school I came home crying because most of the student in my class spoke English including the teachers and I was very depressed and confused because I wanted to understand what everybody was talking about and wanted know how to speak the language everybody knew. Eventually as I started growing up and seeing my English speaking peers and teacher speak the language I started getting more and more comfortable with it. I still stumble when I come to words I don't understand but it’s a huge difference than when I started learning

When I first came to the US, I couldn’t speak a word of English. At the beginning, a huge depression invaded me; after school, I locked in my bathroom and cried for hours. After a month, I remembered that I had come to this country to pursue a better education, thus a better future. Therefore, I decided that something else had to be done because weeping wasn’t solving anything. That day, I developed a schedule, where I would spend half of the day studying vocabulary and reviewing conversations until I learned the language, which I did a year later.

I always knew I was different or didn’t fit in as well as my other classmates. I mean, sure I talked, dressed and pretty much looked like everyone else, but my ethnic background made me think I couldn’t succeed in life because I was born in a foreign country. Whenever people would talk about immigration at school, I would became very uncomfortable and sit silently. It felt like all eyes were on me, but when I would look around no one was actually staring. They were concentrated on their work or staring off into space.

My life was split between two distinct cultures during my childhood and adolescence. My family immigrated to the United States in the early eighties and moved back to Syria two years after I was born. I completed first and second grade in Syrian public schools before immigrating to the U.S. in 2001. Here, I was placed in English second language classes, which I completed in 9 months. I then continued my fourth grade education in regular classrooms. These two years exposed me to people of various cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds, which cultivated my cultural awareness and shaped my identity. However, I was harassed several times because of my religion and ethnicity. A student once told me “go back to your country, we don’t want you here.” It had never occurred to me that I was perceived as a foreigner despite being a U.S. citizen.

My parents would always tell me, “You have been blessed by being raised in a privileged environment. You do not understand what it is like to grow up hungry and poor.” I would roll my eyes until my retinas felt as though they would detach. “But regardless, always remember that you are Vietnamese.” I would look down to my hands, thinking that these hands were no different from the rest of my peers. They weren’t Vietnamese, they were American; they were happy. If being Vietnamese meant suffering, if it meant the pain of an empty stomach and the mournful sorrows of constant death, then I didn’t want anything to do with it. It wasn’t until the summer of sophomore year in highschool that I had my paradigm shift.

For my first semester of college, I decided to challenge myself and go beyond my comfort zone and move 2,000 miles away from home. Once I moved, I felt like a fish out of water. For the first time in my life, I felt like a minority. I was ridiculed for my ethnicity and my southern pride. I felt acceptance back at home but now I was living in an environment whereI felt like a foreigner. They say you never appreciate something until it’s taken away from you. I didn’t appreciate my Mexican culture or southern pride before my big move; however, when I was gone, I was ready to take the first plane back home to Texas. Several people would give me strange glares, as I would speak Spanish on the phone to talk to my grandmother. People made fun of my love of authentic Mexican food and juicy steaks. Students wrote rude comments about my ethnicity in my dorm’s bulletin board. Eventually, I decided to that Washington wasn’t the place for

1)At the end of my fourth grade, I immigrated to U.S. with my family. When I was in China, I was doing fairly fine in school and lived with my parents in the 7th floor apartment that had no elevator and was under my grandfather’s name. Before my family came to U.S., my mother saw the country as a land of opportunity, and my father couldn’t really argue with her although immigration meant that my father would have to separate from his own father and sisters. After my family settled in my aunt’s house, things rapidly got crazy: my grandfather immediately sold the apartment that we used to live in, falsely accused my parents for using his pensions; my parents could not find jobs and did not have much cash with them after my grandfather took what he thought was “his”, and in response, my grandfather harshly told us to go back to China if we couldn’t bear it; my aunt was extremely emotional at times, arguing with my mother, accusing my father and me for stealing her ring, etc. I can’t really recall these days clearly, but I remember them being depressing and stressful. Although I learned basic English quick enough and

My first impression of America consisted of a scene jam-packed with people, roaring car engines, and flashing lights. Imagine a sweet couple with their two-and-a-half-year-old toddler being deposited by foreign airlines onto American soil for the first time, uncomfortable in their surroundings and unaware this was the usual hustle and bustle found in the American lifestyle. After winning an extremely rare chance to acquire visas, my family and I immigrated to the America from our homeland of Ethiopia. My parents spoke a very little English and I spoke none. Growing up as an immigrant in a foreign land, I had to adapt to my new environment and I struggled with this. Being an immigrant at such a young age caused me to develop feelings of uncertainty

It wasn’t until high school until I understood what I represented – what I symbolized to other immigrant

As civil war severely undermines a nation, the aspect of family can be deeply impacted as well. This most certainly is evident when looking at the case scenario of Akamu and his family, as the civil unrest in Laos contributed to family imbalance by drastically changing the political, social, economic, and even the cultural context of Akamu’s world. Choudhuri, Santiago-Rivera & Garrett (2012) point out that identity found in ethnicity can be associated to a shared political, social, and economic interest. As Akamu’s family fled the political oppression in Laos, he experienced the social in-justice of the government and the prejudice that resulted most likely in the death of his brother. As refugees his family became subject to continual changes in political power, as well as, the social change as a result of migrating to California. This migration increased an economic void as the family left everything behind and began a new life with nothing left aside from their cultural beliefs and heritage. Assessment of Akamu’s historical context will determine the affect on addiction and treatment, just as the presence of race/culture/ethnicity pertains to the risk and resiliency factor, and challenges of treatment based on cultural views.