Familiarity provides comfort and improves an individual's learning capacity. I've always been an engaged student who easily grasps things. I am a Chinese national who was born and nurtured in my own country. After finishing high school, I moved to the United States to attend college. I've lived in this country for four years, and it's taught me a lot of things that I'll never forget. Back in China, the school system, as well as all other aspects of life, are done in Chinese. Therefore, there is an insignificant possibility that an average Chinese national is conversant with Western foreign languages such as English, Germany, French, or Spanish. Coming to the United States presented many challenges that have helped me to identify my strengths and weaknesses, which were hidden.
I came to the USA with great expectations that I would maintain the ease learning that I had back in China. I hoped that I would finish my course without any difficulties. I had never had any form of interaction with American people or English-speaking people in China. Here, I had to use the language as my main form of communication. After joining college in the USA for my bachelor’s degree in finance, I realized that I could not keep up with the local citizens or international students who had used English for their education since childhood. While I was used to writing and thinking in Chinese, I found myself doing things in a slower than usual manner because I had to think through something then translate the thoughts to English, before I could put them on paper. I found it difficulty as the college education is designed for advanced English speakers, yet I constantly had to use my phone to translate words from Chinese.
I made friends easily in China, thanks to my outgoing personality. However, thanks to my lack of a strong mastery of the English vocabulary, the rate of my talkativeness reduced significantly. The experience caused me to have less friends. In China, I was used to an environment where I could talk to anyone about anything. In the USA, I found myself in an excluded society where I had to choose friends carefully based on their personality. Considering the fact that the introverts are usually less judging compared to the extroverts, I found myself naturally inclined to becoming friends with the former. My situation had slowly forced me to craft a new personality for myself, which would help me to fit into the system. This personality has remained with me to this date.
When I had plans to come to the USA, I expected that I would experience a culture shock as I knew it to be a country with a representation of all the types of culture in the world. AT first, this idea comforted me as it gave me the comfort that I would find many Chinese friends who had grown in China, like me, and had migrated to this nation. I knew that they would have shared with me their experiences and lessons learnt, which would have helped me to make decisions on various factors. However, arriving here presented a different picture as I settled down in a community that was multicultural. This factor contributed to my difficulty in making friends as I hardly knew how to handle myself when talking to people of any other kind apart from the Chinese. Despite my best efforts to connect, there was the recurrent problem of having to think through every sentence in Chinese before translating it to English, which made conversations seem forced. This made me uncomfortable most of the time.
After completing my first semester of college, I received my grades, and, even though I did not pass as highly as I had been used to, I was satisfied that I had not failed. I had panicked at the time I sat the paper as I doubted if my English would take me through the exams. After that, I had to beat my fears by expanding my social circle; I resolved to talk more often to people and make friends. The experiences I have gathered while living in the United States have taught me how to overcome my fears and important lessons about the power of diversity. I currently have many friends from all backgrounds and races, each of whom is unique in his or her own right.
