My heart was always full of things I wanted to say -- questions that needed answering, or opinions bubbling beneath the surface, but I no longer had words to say them. I had lost my old world, but could not gain my footing in my new land.
How I longed to be normal -- a normal Korean or a normal American, I did not care. But I knew that I was neither. My family history had aged me far beyond my years, although I had only a child's vocabulary in English. I could not go back, as my American experience soon made me different from my fellow Koreans. But my assimilation into America was imperfect. I chuckled at Gary Soto's essay "Looking for Work," about how he wished to make his American family act like the perfect families on TV, like Father Knows Best. It is hard to imagine one's family like a typical American stereotype when kimchi rather than Kool-Aid is more commonly seen on the dining room table! And like many Asian students, I felt pressured to succeed, given how much my parents had been through, and also because of the self-imposed pressures to which I subjected myself. Perhaps more so than white students, Asian students feel an added drive to achieve great things in school because the cultural stereotype suggests that they must be 'better than average' at academics. Yet I simply wanted to improve my English and feel normal when I arrived. I felt a great deal of pressure put upon me by my fellow first-generation adolescent immigrants. I was still playing catch-up, culturally and linguistically.
So I ask my reader, do not be so quick to judge the person...
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