Most teenagers thirst for freedom from the clutches of their parents. I aspired for a brand new life; one of my dreams was to go abroad.While in Malaysia, I was just daydreaming without goals. Opportunities were scarce and only a few jobs were available. My classmates often went to the same colleges because there were limited options .There weren’t unique activities to try. I wanted to expand my horizons and challenge my limits. I wished to live a full and meaningful life. Thus, my sister and I decided to leave a seemingly tedious life and move to New York City, where our parents met.

Since my first language was not English, I was in extreme horror meeting new people when I first came to New York. I was placed in an ESL class and encountered lots of embarrassing moments because I could not keep up with the pace of English speakers. I felt extremely awkward that I couldn’t get their points and realised my lack of knowledge of English. Except for being self aware of my poor English skills, I got provoked by my relative too.We have one and only siblings that live in New York City: my dad’s brother family. Our relationship is not close but, when holidays approach we still took initiative to visit them. Sometimes, you don’t feel how bad you are until people criticise and strike your self esteem. While that always happened between the conversation between my parents, comparing their own kids to others, Asian parents don’t give compliments to their own kids frequently. What I heard every time, “ Your kid was so good at studying, not like mine, they were all  lazy,”  my mom complained. My uncle added “ No, you’re too overrate them.They are not that obedient like your kids.” Living under comparison wasn’t an issue anymore but it still hurt me in a certain way. One day after dining at my uncle house, we chatted about school work and of course routinely asked me how’s my english speaking skill. He asked “ Does it affect my homework?” or “did I fail any subject?” Since he sent her daughter to study out of state, he thought that I couldn’t have that many accomplishment and occasionally asked me if I keep up in school with my English standard. His comment hurt me unintentionally but I motivated myself and worked even harder. I practiced my English with my sister, correcting each other mistakes and read storybooks to boost my knowledge of English.

I don’t like thick books especially the ones that do not contain any animation. Colorful images always attract people’s attention, but there is no doubt that novels and fictional stories never look interesting to me. When you are a kid, animated cartoons always appear interesting and until now I still prefer animated movies. Luckily, one of my favourite movies changed my perspective on reading books. Not exaggerating, I still remember a few years ago, on one of the nights while my brother, sister and me sat in front of the TV randomly choosing which channel we were going to watch, a movie popped out. It was just the beginning of the movie and we found ourselves lucky and decided to continue to watch it. It’s a vampire love story named “Twilight” , I’m so obsessed with it although we all broke our “curfew” by still watching until late at night. That obsessed feeling with the movie remained in my heart no matter how many times I rewatched it and this movie eventually ignited my interest to read the book. The first time reading Twilight novel was pretty exciting to me because I was expecting a more detailed content that was not appeared in the screen. But I still couldn’t finished a book in one night which I always heard others would borrowed a few books home from the library and finished reading them within a week often made me jealous of them, struggling with deep vocab doing translating slow me down reading the continued part. I regretted that I did not have the passion to read books previously that caused me to have a lot of  hardship and limited vocab in writing essays. But after go into reading, I found myself attract to the story and forgetting the length of reading. I shouldn’t resist books with all those tiny words anymore.

  I considered myself as a very lucky person, although I graduated high school that’s not in the same age as the regular student do, my teachers never gave up on us. Their consistent encouragement helped me get through tons of bumps. By now, I’m still a slow learner, worrying if people could understand me, but I know that remaining silent or staying in my own comfort zone would never get things rectified. I’m still continuing learning from my mistakes and making myself better for the year to come.