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Have you ever seen the movie Coming to America》? It was a pretty old and funny one staring with Eddie Murphy. While I'm no African prince, but more than 30 years ago today, I also went to the U.S. with only $300 cash and two suitcases and a full scholarship offered by a U.S. university to pursue my post graduate degrees of my dream.
My first stop was San Francisco where I went through the U.S. custom for the first time ever. I still remember that it was on a Tuesday since the custom officer who examined my legal papers was a talkative person. It was a quiet big hall. His voice was even echoed inside. He said that he was bored since it was a Tuesday and Tuesdays were worst because it's after Monday. On Mondays you just had a happy weekend before it. And Tuesday is the further-est weekday other than Monday from the next weekend!
Anyway, my next stop was Atlanta. And then I transferred from there to the city where my university is. It felt like I was in a dream. China has just opened to the world. Everything I saw was so impressive and incredibly amazing at that time. Needless to say, I was in a couture shock.
Since I received the scholarship for my study, I had to work as a teaching assistant. But my spoken English was so poor that in my first advanced mathematical analysis class, I almost didn't understand anything the professor said. I remember the way that professor looked me after the class. It seemed as if he was looking at a person whose fate was certainly doomed! But later to his amazement, I was academically so competitive that I could even help my fellow graduate students in the class with my poor English.
One way for me to improve my English quickly was, I helped my American friends with their homework, and in exchange, we hang out, and watched movies, football games together so that we could constantly communicate in English.
Many years have gone passed. I and tens of thousands first generation of Chinese students like me from those years have overcome the all new challenging environment overseas and became successful in our own specialized field. And things in common for most of us at those years are: we were all "poor students" without the financial support of wealthy parents, and we were all worked extremely hard to achieve our goals. Like the saying in America, we were all "Lean and Mean". And we are survivors.
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