Just Try

            I live in Flushing, Queens. Close by is main street, and it’s basically a smaller Chinatown, so when I go to school, you can always find a lot of Asians in the same grade, especially kids that speaks Chinese. But I couldn’t speak or understand Mandarin or Cantonese. So, whenever I made friends with a group of people that could speak Chinese, they would always speak to one another who could understand, but I was left out. I was made fun of for not pronouncing the language right, for the basic sayings just as hi. I wasn’t pressured by my parents to learn the language, and i think that that’s because they wanted us to mainly learn english, that way we can have a better future in the U.S because they focus on us living a life where we can be safe, and comfortable where we have a good future. But I soon became insecure that I couldn’t speak our native language as every night for dinner we all ate together, I would talk with my siblings in English, while my parents spoke in Chinese, talking about what’s going on in the world, to drama going on in the family. But I would either listen, talk in English, or just zone out at the dinner table, eating and being in my own thoughts. That’s how it was for as long as I could remember. But that changed a few months into senior year of high school. So, I tried to learn the language, because I also wanted to speak with my family and grandparents. My grandparents speak very limited English, only learning from us, and I want to be able to communicate with them more than I had before. I wanted to learn to speak as a way for me to connect closer with my parents, because I also know that it’s important to them that I learn the language whenever I might travel and meet my relatives and cousins in China. 

            I wrote this narrative because I wanted to tell a story of someone who didn’t learn and couldn’t understand a language that their family spoke and was insecure to even try. But I wanted to show that it’s not too late to try, and that it’s always better to start now than never, because it’s always better to learn later than never, especially when you can grow a stronger and special bond with the people close to you. When learning about the practices of show and tell, like when reading about June Jordan and the effects of learning a language can do for us, and through her way of allowing me to see all these scenes of her teaching black English. I added this into my writing by adding in dialogue of conversations and when I’m learning, to let the reader feel like they’re with me as I’m learning.  I especially liked to use the concept of genre, making this into a personal essay, allowing me to have full freedom into making this narrative really allowed me to think deep into how I wanted to construct it (even if it took me a long time to find what I wanted to write about). Doing this assignment allowed me to “recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations”, in order to hook my readers into the story, and it was also done through the writing of Jennifer Tamayo, where she hooked in the readers using her own language and writing style, drawing the reader in to focus and think on what she’s really saying.