I’m the Asian being held/comforted by the teacher on the right.
I can only imagine how silly I looked my first day of school. I get a little embarrassed thinking back on it now. I must have been all trussed up in brightly-colored, matching sweats from Taiwan, butchered Engrish slogans strategically placed all over the whole getup. What can I say to defend my childhood fashion faux pas? Ignorance is bliss. Apart from looking like I had come straight from Taiwan, I sounded it also. I entered pre-school not knowing a lick of conversational English. It was a little like being tossed into the fire.
This presented a problem to the Westport Board of Education that I’m not sure they’ve ever had to address before. As far as I can remember, I was not placed in an English as a Second Language program, probably because (I’m going out on a limb here) I was one of the first completely non-English speaking students they were ever presented with.
Instead of creating a separate class for my “special” needs, I was just given extra attention by the teacher that served only to further isolated me from the rest of the class. I didn’t mind though. Being thrust into the classroom setting and forced to interact with English speakers and daily television therapy soon had me jabbering in English wherever I went, loosening my reliance on speaking Mandarin Chinese, a skill that was proving to be useless in this environment that I was quickly adapting to.
It was here in these early classrooms that my love for reading was first cultivated. I learned English letters quickly and found myself reading more and more at a very young age. As I mastered the ability to read at a certain grade level, I quickly moved on, finding more interesting reading material just around the corner on a different library bookshelf. I was a voracious reader at an early age, spending hours at the library perusing the hallowed book stacks. I always ended up checking out a stack of books too heavy for me to easily carry to bring home and pore over. The library was my safe haven and the only colorblind space I could engage myself with at ease.
lucky.. i hated english cus everyone picked on me for bad speaking skills .. and now look at me.. my english even more sucks
hahaha! cute! “my english even more suckzzz”
So this is why you always correct me…Cause you had it hard in the past.
Oh Soon-Du-Liu
no matter how white washed i am, believe it or not, cantonese chinese was my first language. then i went to school and my parents wanted me to do well in english so they started speaking chinglish to me, which soon turned to english. i always did poorly on reading comprehension though
nerds are cool.
doing poorly on english comprehension may be correlated to being bilingual! includable in grad school apps, says my supervisor, a PhD in the psychiatry department studying bilingualism.
i love reading, but have always sucked at reading comprehension… which makes sense because i rarely remember much about the book except that i enjoyed it. haha!
yo jane, that is me all day….
i dont ever recall ever thinking u were fob…. im confused. haha. but nice going. I remember loving the library because I wanted to read fast to earn pizzas from Pizza Hut. I always did. and because I won a reading contest, my free gift was a free pick from any book on the table, and i found Mossflower in junior high. i will never be the same.
I don’t think there was a struggle but I remember that I only went to the library to play lemmings or word muncher.