Who Am I?
When people ask who you are, probably everyone’s instant response would be delivering your full name to the questioner. Yet name is nothing but some letters shown on your ID or driver license. A name doesn’t make a person quite different from others. What does is his background, views of world and life. Probably till now what makes special first is still my Asian appearance and my hardly-pronounced-correctly Chinese name. Yet as time goes by I will be an unique individual at this campus, even in the whole United States, only because I am Chinese. My past 19 years of life experience in China and everything I know about my family and my home country are the very things that make me who I am and possibly who I will become.
I didn’t realize the importance of my nationality until I went on board and departed from Shanghai. When I sat next to an American boy on plane and ate a hamburger the flight attendent handed me, I, for the first time, sensed the feeling of leaving. Being away from home to travel in another city might be called leaving; but leaving your homeland to live in a completely different cultural environment is more than homesickness. It’s a chanllege as well as an opportunity, which enables me to reconsider who I am, a question I never felt difficult to answer to. Some friends advised before I took off that the key to adapting to a new place is to consider it home away from home. Sure the significance of a sense of belonging cannot be underestimated. But it’s not an one-way road. You might feel you belong to someone or somewhere. But only when someone or somewhere accepts you and permits you to get involved will your sense of belonging make some sense.
There is such a long way to go to let a different society to admit an alien as one of them, to respect and perceive their difference. And the first step, for me, probably for a lot of new comers to this huge land, is to find our own place. We have to know who we are first. Then we are eligible to be recognized and be understood and then we are capable to let others accept us.
Who am I? To be honest, I am stil trying to figure it out.