When I was in sixth grade, I went to live in
San Diego, California. At first, I didn’t want to go there at all. After all, I
had all my friends here in Korea, and my life was perfectly fine. Why in the
world did I have to go to a new place and face all the challenges? But in the
end, I did. Well, to tell the truth, I was half-forced by my parents to go, who
thought studying abroad would be a great experience for me.
So,
on a sunny day in the last week of August, after sixteen hours of flight and a
transfer at LAX, I was standing in San Diego International Airport with my
parents and a ton of luggage. The first impression? Well, it was weird. And it
wasn’t comfortable at all. I mean, the city itself was warm and looked good and
clean. Well, just like a normal city. But I just couldn’t get the hang of it.
It was too new and unfamiliar, I guess. Even small things like there being no
tollgates for freeways made me surprised and anxious. They gave me thoughts
like ‘What kind of place is this?’ and I started to wonder if I would be able
to live there without any trouble for the next two years.
One
of the important things we had to take care of was enrolling in a middle school.
I was supposed to go to Carmel Valley Middle School, and honestly, I didn’t
like it. I can’t explain why exactly, but I had this feeling of being an
outsider, a little Asian boy who couldn’t speak English well, trapped in a
world of English-speaking people. I remember the feeling I had the first time I
stepped into the school. It felt so big, and it felt like all the teachers
there were staring at me—even though most of them probably didn’t even bother
to give me a glance. I didn’t know what to do, and I had no idea what I was
doing there.
But,
well, I had to go to a school, and I was admitted into Carmel Valley. And as I
expected, it was hard. Everyone was so fluent in English, and most students
didn’t even try to get to know about me. It was totally up to me, how I acted, to
decide whether I would make friends and have a fun school life or whether I’d
just stay as an outsider in the classes. I chose the former. Well, basically
that was the only choice I had; I didn’t want to be alone for the next two
years. I tried and tried, and thankfully I started making some close friends soon.
After
about two months, I didn’t feel like a left-out Asian kid anymore. I was a part
of the school, a part of the society. I had lunch with my friends, ate their
tater tots and curly fries, played card games, and walked to classes together. We
went paintballing for birthdays, and played table tennis. They even threw a
surprise party for me when it was time to leave the country.
One
of the best memories I have with my friends is doing a group project in math for
extra credit—we had to write new lyrics, about mathematical concepts, for a
song of our choice and actually record ourselves singing it. I was in a group
of three, with Eric and Kelsey, and I remember chatting on Gmail for hours
writing lyrics and planning out everything. By the time we finished, we had
transformed “My Love” by Westlife into “My Math” by Eastlife.
It
took almost a week to complete the project. We had funny weird lines like “find
the circumcenter of the triangle, that’s math,” and it was pretty obvious that we
all were really bad at singing. But still, we had lots of fun writing the
lyrics and singing—close to screaming—in front of each other. And after turning
in our final version of the recording, we ended up posting our video on YouTube,
voluntarily. I really enjoyed the time doing all this with my friends, and I
still have the video on my flash drive so that I can play it anytime.
At
the end of my two years in San Diego, I didn’t want to come back to Korea. By
then, I could say for sure that I was a Carmel Valley Bobcat, that I was a true
San Diegan. The school and the city didn’t feel strange anymore; it felt like
home. Well, San Diego was my home.
Everyone
has hard times, especially when they move to a new place, a new environment.
Right now, most of us are probably worrying about our lives in KMLA. We all are
new here, and what we are going through right now is totally different from
what we expected—well, for me that is. Some might even be thinking that their
middle school lives were a whole lot better than the life in KMLA. But don’t be
so negative. We’ll all get used to this someday and we’ll enjoy it. And by the
time we graduate, we’ll all be an important member of the ‘KMLA Family.’
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