Thursday, April 08, 2004
Six Years Ago...
Over six years ago my life was changing. I had just moved with my family back to the USA after living abroad for four years. It was probably one of the most difficult changes I've gone through in my life. I was 12 years old, which in and of itself is just an awkward age--remember puberty and all that? Not fun... To make matters worse, my English was pretty rusty after speaking it very little for the past four years. I didn't really have any friends here in the US. Well, some of my old friends were around from four years ago. I had hoped we would reconnect, but that hoped came crashing down like a whole lot of other things did around then.
While my parents were insistent on coming back to the states, claiming there would be many more opportunities, better jobs, and just a chance to live a better life, my new life here was anything but any of that. I was lonely. I didn't really have friends in school or out of school. I didn't really have places to meet people. My English wasn't that great, and after speaking up in class a couple times and getting mocked by the whole class for mispronouncing some words, I decided I'd be better off if I just shut my mouth and spare myself the grief.
Sure there was something nice about the USA. We lived in, what seemed to us, a fancy apartment complex in the suburbs that had a pool, underground parking and manicured green lawns. The strip malls and shopping centers where you could find anything seemed convenient. The roads were wide and well-paved. The people walked around with plastic smiles and everything seemed aesthetic, nice and good ole' 50s style peachy-keen. Nevertheless, I felt like an awkward blemish in the hygienic American landscape... I had always been intrigued by people of foreign places, wanting to learn about their lives abroad and their countries, being foreign never seemed like a bad thing to me, but all of a sudden I felt foreign, and all of a sudden, foreign didn't seem like such a good thing to be anymore.
12 wasn't easy. Aside from going through all the crap of early adolescence, I had to cope with the struggles that being a "foreigner" presented. Without friends to catch me, I had to find ways to pick myself up and bring myself to carry on every time I would trip and fall flat on my face. I had to get used to a new school. I had to learn how to live again without the warmth and comfort of an extended family nearby. Worse yet, no matter where I turned, I had to struggle with a language I did not know all too well, and I had to put up with some people's anal need to correct every one of my ungrammatical sentences or the sullen laughter that my "funny" pronunciation of some words attracted.
Silence became a survival strategy. The less I talked, the less people laughed. The less I talked, the less people could use me for their own power trips and correct everything I said. Most people I encountered seemed much less interested in what I had to say, or why I had to say it. But eventually, the silence gave way to insecurity and shame. I didn't want to talk because everyone around me made me feel like I was always wrong. So I figured I should shut up until I started feeling the same way everyone else did about things. No... That never came.
My silence gave people another thing to spin off of in stigamtizing me. Now I wasn't just the weird, foreign kid who couldn't talk right. I also became the quiet loner who never spoke up in class or never gossiped with the other kids during lunch break. Since I didn't talk much, people started to assume I was inferior... ephemeral, one of the place holders in other people's memory who eventually fades into a silhouette with no name or history. People didn't expect much of me, so all of a sudden it didn't really matter when someone threw a frisbee that hit my head--I didn't deserve an apology. Or, it suddenly, it was OK to call me a loser in front of the whole class when I had finally built up the courage to tell the math teacher I liked the stuff we were learning--I didn't have feelings. It was a fun game to put used gum all over my locker or in my books because the principal wouldn't do anything about it anyway when I complained. Heck, it didn't even matter when finally one day I couldn't take it anymore and spent the last two hours crying in school--but of course, that didn't make much of a difference. No one really cared.
Six years ago, I didn't feel like much of a person. People didn't treat me very well, and for somehow I was led to believe that it was all my fault anyway. I was made to feel that my feelings didn't matter, that my presence wasn't worth much, that I might as well just disappear because no one would care much about it (except my family who were all far away except my parents and sister who were all too busy struggling with this funny, new life themselves). My strength, immunity and resilience gave way to numbness. I'd absorb insults and criticism like a sponge that gets heavier with each drop. I'd let the snotty kids shut me up with their domineering, spoiled snottiness. After a while of all that, I forgot that I actually deserved respect from people, and eventually I think I came very close to forgetting that I should even respect myself and care for my well-being.
While my parents were insistent on coming back to the states, claiming there would be many more opportunities, better jobs, and just a chance to live a better life, my new life here was anything but any of that. I was lonely. I didn't really have friends in school or out of school. I didn't really have places to meet people. My English wasn't that great, and after speaking up in class a couple times and getting mocked by the whole class for mispronouncing some words, I decided I'd be better off if I just shut my mouth and spare myself the grief.
Sure there was something nice about the USA. We lived in, what seemed to us, a fancy apartment complex in the suburbs that had a pool, underground parking and manicured green lawns. The strip malls and shopping centers where you could find anything seemed convenient. The roads were wide and well-paved. The people walked around with plastic smiles and everything seemed aesthetic, nice and good ole' 50s style peachy-keen. Nevertheless, I felt like an awkward blemish in the hygienic American landscape... I had always been intrigued by people of foreign places, wanting to learn about their lives abroad and their countries, being foreign never seemed like a bad thing to me, but all of a sudden I felt foreign, and all of a sudden, foreign didn't seem like such a good thing to be anymore.
12 wasn't easy. Aside from going through all the crap of early adolescence, I had to cope with the struggles that being a "foreigner" presented. Without friends to catch me, I had to find ways to pick myself up and bring myself to carry on every time I would trip and fall flat on my face. I had to get used to a new school. I had to learn how to live again without the warmth and comfort of an extended family nearby. Worse yet, no matter where I turned, I had to struggle with a language I did not know all too well, and I had to put up with some people's anal need to correct every one of my ungrammatical sentences or the sullen laughter that my "funny" pronunciation of some words attracted.
Silence became a survival strategy. The less I talked, the less people laughed. The less I talked, the less people could use me for their own power trips and correct everything I said. Most people I encountered seemed much less interested in what I had to say, or why I had to say it. But eventually, the silence gave way to insecurity and shame. I didn't want to talk because everyone around me made me feel like I was always wrong. So I figured I should shut up until I started feeling the same way everyone else did about things. No... That never came.
My silence gave people another thing to spin off of in stigamtizing me. Now I wasn't just the weird, foreign kid who couldn't talk right. I also became the quiet loner who never spoke up in class or never gossiped with the other kids during lunch break. Since I didn't talk much, people started to assume I was inferior... ephemeral, one of the place holders in other people's memory who eventually fades into a silhouette with no name or history. People didn't expect much of me, so all of a sudden it didn't really matter when someone threw a frisbee that hit my head--I didn't deserve an apology. Or, it suddenly, it was OK to call me a loser in front of the whole class when I had finally built up the courage to tell the math teacher I liked the stuff we were learning--I didn't have feelings. It was a fun game to put used gum all over my locker or in my books because the principal wouldn't do anything about it anyway when I complained. Heck, it didn't even matter when finally one day I couldn't take it anymore and spent the last two hours crying in school--but of course, that didn't make much of a difference. No one really cared.
Six years ago, I didn't feel like much of a person. People didn't treat me very well, and for somehow I was led to believe that it was all my fault anyway. I was made to feel that my feelings didn't matter, that my presence wasn't worth much, that I might as well just disappear because no one would care much about it (except my family who were all far away except my parents and sister who were all too busy struggling with this funny, new life themselves). My strength, immunity and resilience gave way to numbness. I'd absorb insults and criticism like a sponge that gets heavier with each drop. I'd let the snotty kids shut me up with their domineering, spoiled snottiness. After a while of all that, I forgot that I actually deserved respect from people, and eventually I think I came very close to forgetting that I should even respect myself and care for my well-being.
