Personal Narrative: Iranian-American Upbringing

Although I was born in America, I have always felt like an immigrant. Why? Because I was a different race from the majority of the people around me. I live in Garrett County, where the majority of the population is white. My family was the only Chinese family in the county. On top of that factor, I had spent most of my toddler years back in Fujian, China with my grandparents. I came back to America when I was five years old and began Pre-K soon after my arrival. Throughout my years in public school, I have learned that the American identity is achieved by assimilation while retaining some unique characteristics.

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.

America is like a family for while we squabble on the inside we come together to defeat the threats on the outside.We are now more deeply divided than we have ever been.For some people, it seems as if America will never come back to being united and that we are destined to be driven more and more apart.

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.

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.

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

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

Living in America has its ups and downs. The different culture and people is what makes America to me. Every day I learn something new while I go to school in America. Personally, as the days go back I carless about humanity and more about myself and how to improve myself. Money has become a major need for me recently and I don’t believe in love anymore. Sometime I just sit and think what kind of person I be like if I keep living in America. I’m happy I can here for school, I don’t think I would know this must about life. And as the days pass by I learn so much more about myself that it makes me question if I ever knew anything to begin with. Unfortunately, I still wonder what life would have been like if I did my college education in Nigeria.

Growing up in America, I have always been surrounded by many cultures and different ethnic groups. Many of those cultures differ from my own traditionally. For the first half of my life, I was raised in detroit, a predominantly black city - I had always assumed. My family eventually moved out of Detroit and we moved to Inkster. Inkster was a much smaller city, but it was also a predominantly black city. In 2011, my family moved from Inkster, Michigan to Canton, Michigan. Although the two cities are less than a half hour apart - the cultural and ethnic groups are extremely diverse. While attending my freshman year of high school in Canton I realized, I was a minority there. More than half of the student body, more than half of the community

Twelve years ago, my life changed forever. Giddy with the idea of a new opportunity, my family made the decision pick up our lives in Fujisawa, Japan, and fly to the other side of the world. As a seven year old girl, I was oblivious to the hardships that awaited me in America. In school, language forged a towering barrier between me and the rest of my classmates, where my inability to communicate and understand American culture left me without a single companion. Although I became accustomed to the language overtime, my disconnect with American culture still restricted my ability to connect with my peers. In this time of anguish, I created my first social media account, Facebook, at the suggestion of my mother. While the sudden influx of information

I was born in Havana, Cuba and lived there for ten years. If I am honest I cannot remember much about Cuba unlike my mother; however even though I cannot remember much I always used to think that Cuba was home regardless of how long we stayed in America. Similar to most children I took after the actions of my parents while growing up. If my mother and grandmother spoke about Cuba or any topic related to it I would listen to them and then I tried to have the same conversation with my uncle as if to let them know that I was thinking about Cuba as well. I used to believe that when we flew over to America we brought Cuba with us and that was a normal thing; however my thinking was changed over the course of only one year in America.

One day I was sitting in English class doing my work. Then a flying whale flew into the wall and destroyed it. It flew over to me and swallowed me whole. It then just flew back to the ocean. While in the whale's stomach I saw some interesting things like a dead person, a needle with steroids in it, a few soccer balls, a rabbit, and a roll of duct tape. After I had been in the whale's stomach for about 3 hours, it started to shake violently. Then something was squeezing the life out of the whale. All of the sudden i was flying through the air along with everything else. I landed on some sort of island.

I have traveled from Australia to Europe and seen many sights of which are indescribable and unknown in the United States but they haven’t been able to capture the unique beauty of my backyard. It started as a blank canvas that my dad could shape any way he pleased. A palm tree, a pool, a small garden, and a “Man Cave”, as my mom called the covered patio, that had a TV and a fireplace. After its creation had taken place, my dad and I grew fond of the relaxing setting and its pure elements.

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.

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.