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America the Promised Land I’ll never forget October 17, 1987. Every year, I approach that date with memories and a sense of strangeness. There’s another year that I’ve been in the United States, I think to myself. I used to think that to live in the United States for ten years was a long time. Now I look back at how fast things have changed and how long I’ve been here. I look back at the last eleven years, and I think, how silly I was about preconceptions about the United States when I had just immigrated. I had lived in my grandmother’s house for the last two months of my stay in Hong Kong, because we had already sold our little flat. Later, I would learn that while we had sold it for about US$100,000, property prices would rise so dramatically in the nineties that our house is worth about US$300,000 today. As young as I was at seven years of age, I knew at that time that I would miss Hong Kong. I called my best friend at the time to say goodbye, and then, I was ready for the great adventure across the waters (side note: this friend and I would exchange letters for a few years thereafter, then we lost track of each other; just this year, we found each other again through an Internet communication program called ICQ; without the Internet, I don’t know if we’d ever hear from each other again). At the waiting area in the airport in Hong Kong, I was astounded to find that almost all the people were foreign. They, I assumed, were American. I asked my parents why there were so many Americans on a flight from Hong Kong, and they told me that Americans were visiting and were returning to their home, my new home. I did see a Chinese man in a tight black suit and a suitcase though; that at least comforted me to know that there were Chinese people going to America. As the plane took off, I took one last look at the gleaming, beautiful lights of Hong Kong, thinking sadly that I would never see my home again. America that first week was a wonderful new experience for me. San Francisco International Airport was new, modern, and extremely large compared to Kai Tek Airport in Hong Kong, which, when I returned there in 1994, I realized looked like a small train stations from the sixties. Before coming to the States, me and my friends had preconceptions of America as a modern and technologically advanced place. SFO did not disappoint. When we arrived in Southern California, I was surprised by the volumes of cars and the fact that there were traffic jams in America too. I had assumed that America was so big that there would be enough roads to prevent traffic jams unlike the tight quarters of Hong Kong. The first day we were in Irvine, our future home, we ate at an American restaurant. When I tried an American soup, I thought that it tasted extremely salty and thick and was quite inferior to Chinese soups. When I arrived at Culverdale Elementary School to explore the possibility of me going there, I saw that the teacher there used an electrical pencil sharpener. I had never seen one of those before. When I signed up for classes, I decided to go into an ESL (English as a Second Language) class instead of a regular class so that I could adjust to America and be in a class with other people who spoke Cantonese. Instead, I was shocked and dismayed to learn once I was in the class that there were no people from Hong Kong in my class. There were a few from Taiwan, but all the rest of the people were from strange places like Korea, Japan, and France. Another thing that distressed me was that it did not snow. I had assumed that it snowed in America, but no one had told me that Southern California was the land of sunshine. I remember vividly my first Thanksgiving experience. We ate at the house of one of my uncle’s American friends, so the food was quite authentic. I remember my first taste of apple pie, and how disgusting I thought it tasted. I actually love apple pie now, but tasting it for the first time made my mouth tingle. I also tried the pumpkin pie, which I thought was acceptable enough even though the color and texture of the pie was so strange. Nowadays, I hate eating pumpkin pie. As I grew up, I would learn that America wasn’t quite so technologically advanced, and it wasn’t as wonderfully perfect as I thought it was going to be (now I know Hong Kong has a lower crime rate than Los Angeles, Hong Kong has more cellular phones per capita, and not all Americans dress in suits and a lot more Americans are obese in their old age than Chinese). For many years, I missed Hong Kong and living in the big city. But as the years went by, I got used to it. Two years, five years, ten years went by. I just had my eleventh Thanksgiving last weekend. This Christmas, I will be staying in Hong Kong, the first time I will have spent my Christmas in Hong Kong in eleventh years. I like America now. I speak English better than I do Chinese, and I have more American friends than Chinese friends. I know where it snows in America and I know the story of Thanksgiving. But every once in awhile, when I see an electric pencil sharpener, when I smell the aroma of an apple pie, when I drink the lovely potato leek soup in my dorm dining hall, I think of those first days in the promised land called America. |