Blog of the J.A.D.E

I’ve hated going to new schools ever since my parents secretly left me at my YMCA daycare on my first day there and I cried all day. In third grade, I got home from school one day, got ready to do my homework and my mom and dad said we were moving to the US . I wasn’t too happy about that. 

I just said, “Oh okay.” But I didn’t feel like that. I felt like screaming what!!!?? Are you crazy? I don’t want to go to the US ! I’m fine here and I have my friends here plus how in the world am I going to understand the language and even though I took English lessons in Taiwan that doesn’t mean I would be able to understand the language that well but I didn’t because I was afraid I was going to get in trouble. I just felt angry and surprised that they would even want to move there, haven’t they heard it was very cold there? They knew I couldn’t stand cold weather!

It turned out that we were moving to Texas , sunny, dry Texas . The first thing that comes to mind when people say Texas is cowboys and desert, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

When the day I was dreading for so long (the first day of school) finally came, I mentally prepared myself for school. My mom kept saying, “You’re going to be fine. You’ll make friends and have no trouble at all.” But I didn’t believe her because she sounded like she was trying to convince herself to let me go to school alone. It was 1-8-2007 , a cold winter day and by the time I got to school, I felt like my body was going to freeze from the cold, but it didn’t.

I took a deep breath and walked into the classroom with a tiny step. I’ve always been a clumsy person so when I stepped onto an uneven surface, I tripped and stumbled into the classroom. Everybody turned to stare at me and started whispering to each other. They all looked at me weirdly and kept staring until—“Eh-hem! Everyone back to work!” It was my new teacher, Mrs. Ransom. Later I found out why everybody kept staring, I was the only Asian in the whole school of 745 kids!

I was starting to get used to the silence and the classroom itself when the teacher started talking. I couldn’t understand anything at all. To the other kids she probably said, “Today we are going to learn about how to multiply……” But to me she sounded like, “Bah Blah doodle doo.” She droned on and on and I started to tune out. After a while, she finished and the only word I caught was cube which at that time I didn’t know what it was.

I told the teacher I didn’t know what to do so she assigned a short, plump and unsmiling girl named Adelina to help me. Adelina wasn’t the nicest person in the classroom but she was patient and was technically my translator the whole day so I was very grateful for her help.

When it was recess time I was very confused. What do you do during recess? Why is there recess? Where is recess? What is recess? I even thought recess was a who! I never had recess before in my whole life, so I was very bored and hated every moment of it. I just sat on a bench and waited for it to end.

My head was swarming with questions by lunch time. Everything’s different here. You don’t have to clean your school, in Taiwan everybody, including the first and second graders, were assigned to a spot to clean. After you finish, a guy or girl comes to see if you cleaned a good job or not, if you don’t, you clean it again and you only have 20 minutes to do all that stuff.

As my class walked down the quiet, dim hallway to lunch, I realized several things, 1. This school is tiny compared to my old one, the old one was 6 stories high! 2. You don’t have to take naps here. 3. There are only about 20 people in a class and about 5 classes in each grade, in Taiwan , there’s about 35 kids in each class, 10 classes in each grade and 6 grades in total, the kindergarteners go to another school. 4. There were about 2000 kids in a school in Taiwan while there are only about 750 here.

We walked into the loud, enormous cafeteria and I was astonished. People were shouting and laughing and sitting with their friends! Laura, a girl I just became friends with asked, “Do you want to sit with me and my friends? They’re really fun and you’ll like them a lot.” I agreed and I had a great time.

After lunch, we had language arts; I didn’t really pay attention since I wouldn’t have understood anything even if I tried. The weird thing came later, when Mrs. Ransom gave us a week to do an easy project, I was going to scream out of happiness, I’ve never had such a long time to do a project before!

“Bye! Jessica! See you tomorrow!” Laura half shouted to me as she ran to catch her bus, “I’ll ask Mrs. Ransom if I can help you tomorrow.” Then she got on her bus. That made me happy because no one had volunteered to help me yet and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything without them. I looked around, hoping to catch sight of my bus unknown to me. Every bus looked exactly the same. Giving up, I went to ask a teacher standing outside helping kids find their buses.

When I got to my apartment, before I did my homework or anything else, I sat down and made a list of things that are different between here and Taiwan . The list went on and on and here are a few of them: In Taiwan, there are no air conditioning in schools, they have naps after lunch, super strict teachers, a lot more homework in a day, no afterschool activities, get out of school at 3:45 pm, way more kids in schools, about 2000, have to clean your own schools, and the teachers put a lot of pressure on you.

I learned a lot of things just that day, including grammar and other Language Arts things, but the most important thing I learned was: When nobody’s there to help you, you have to try your best to work as hard as you can and hope to get things right. I suddenly understood how people that do not understand what people are saying feels like and I hope to never feel like that ever again.