Family Like Most Parents, Mine

Family

Like most parents, mine only want the best for me. They believed that an American education would afford me the greatest opportunities and therefore when I was fifteen sent me to live in Canada. At first I was scared. I was to live at a home stay, in a complete immersion experience while attending an international school. I did not speak a word of English when I left Taiwan. Therefore, I felt a strange mixture of feelings when my parents saw me off at the airport. On the one hand, I knew they loved me and cared deeply about my future. On the other hand, I felt a tinge of resentment. Being their child meant sacrificing my immediate desires to stay home with my friends and familiar surroundings. I also felt pressured to live up to the great expectations my parents had established for me. Being a male child in a family like mine was not easy, because the burden to succeed was all mine. When I arrived at the Vancouver airport, I was on my own for the first time and I had no choice but to grow up.

Being thrust into a totally foreign environment at the age of fifteen seemed frightening at the time, but has made me into self-reliant person with a strong character. The long boring plane ride proved to be a breeze compared to my experience upon arrival. Immigration officials took me into a small room for questioning, but I did not speak a word of English. They were kind but the situation intimidated me: here were men and women wearing uniforms who were concerned about my status and I had no idea what they were saying or what to do. My parents were not there to help; I had no one to help me. Frightened, I waited until finally a translator arrived and then everything cleared up. The moments of terror subsided, and I had the distinct feeling that everything was going to be ok from then on.

I first had to overcome the language and cultural barriers. My host family tried their best to accommodate me but we could not communicate with each other except with gestures, making many mistakes along the way. Some situations were humorous, and others made me want to pack my bags and leave. I spent my first year in Canada in a special ESL program that helped me learn as much English as possible in the shortest period of time. When I started public high school the year after, things seemed to get worse for a while. I was in the ESL class, but it was a real struggle to learn a language I had no prior knowledge of at all. On the very first day we had to introduce ourselves in English, and the only thing that made the situation easier was that I was not the only foreign student in the class. I did not have my parents to comfort me at home, but I did recognize the same feelings in the faces of my fellow students. One of the most difficult things I had to do was to maintain good grades while studying in a foreign language. My parents tried not to be hard on me but I could tell they wanted my grades to improve. It was also difficult making friends.

Therefore, I was lonely and missed home. I had to actively seek ways to make my new environment more comfortable. No longer could I rely on mom and dad to create the feeling of home, with its smells and artifacts. Besides the regular phone calls and emails, I maintained contact with my family through pictures. We would send each other photographs online and in letters, which helped me feel like my family was with me the whole time. I tried to recreate the home that my parents had back in Taiwan, with things I brought to hang on the wall and memorabilia from my childhood. Although I missed my mother's food, I found ways to eat familiar foods that helped me feel more secure and less homesick. Thinking about my parents started to motivate me to work even harder in school. Suddenly I wanted to impress them. As my English improved, so did my grades. I studied hard, which meant that I still struggled to make friends. I knew my parents missed me, too.

My parents have made tremendous sacrifices for me, although I did not realize it at the time. They spent a lot of money to send me abroad, paying for my education and my living expenses. I was too young to appreciate their work at the time, because I was still a teenager. Self-centered and relatively immature, I simply longed for the comforts of home and my old friends. During my senior year in high school, something happened. I met another foreign student who was younger than me. She was struggling to fit in and to learn English, and I could see so much of myself in her. I became her friend and helped her to feel less alone. Meeting her made me think less of myself and more about other people, especially my parents. It dawned on me: my parents sacrificed some of their personal retirement money to help me go to the best school possible, enter the best possible career field, and experience living in a different part of the world. Their sacrifice meant -- and of course still means -- a lot to me.