Personal Narrative Speech- My life in America!

Good morning! Today I'm going to talk about the some experiences that I have experienced during my life in the United States.

           Since my grandparents and cousins on my father's side live in America, I had a lot of opportunities to go to America and study during my summer vacations. But, my parents actually wanted to have more quality environment for me to study for a long period of time not just for summer vacation. So after a long conversation about the actual benefits that I can gain from education in America, our family decided to immigrate. At that time, I was just 5grader in Elementary school so I wasn't fluent in English. Therefore, it was hard to express my opinion and have conversations in English. I thought it would be challenging to go to America and get along with native Americans but at the same time it seem exciting to live a life in America. Due to my past experiences, I expected my school life in America would be harsh, and I was right. I went to Elementary school on the next week that I have stepped on America, because my mom said it won't be any beneficial to drag more time. And starting from that point my life started to tangle. First class that I took in my Elementary school was a science class. According to my memories on the first day, science teacher was talking about some topic related to solar system, but all I hear was language that did not belong to our solar system which was a serious problem. This also happened to me in my daily conversation with my friends. I could understand some basic conversations but it was difficult to me when they started to talk about some jokes. For example, my friend said "Do you know how to wake up Ladygaga? poke her face!"and I couldn't understand. So I tried to find a solution, and finally found the solution that can be connected to all daily conversations. My solution was to act like 'I understood everything' by giving a little smile. So in that case of Ladygaga, I could just smile showing my expression of understanding. But, it had a significant problem. One day my friends were talking about something and I smiled as I usually do pretending that I understood everything. However, one girl turned to me and said "You think that's funny?" and she started to cry. At that time I realized something was wrong. I didn't know they were having serious conversation, and she got angry because I was keep giggling about the things that were so serious.

           And another moment that I have experienced is racism. In Korea, I have learned many thing about race discrimination toward multi cultural students. The serious problem between student and multi cultural students was bullying. We should not bully them because they are just different from us but I didn't expect that I would be one of those minorities who suffer racism. I didn't experience bullying but there were some moment that made me uncomfortable. My first moment that I have experienced racial discrimination was in summer vacation. In summer every year there is a swimming pool party held by the residents at the public swimming pool. I was waiting in the line to ride a water slide but one of the white twins that were in front of me was starring at my face. It kept on like about 20 seconds. So I asked him "Why are you starring at me?" and the reply was "Hey there is a Chinese guy over here" and he started make sounds that were used to mock Chinese. And I said "I'm not even Chinese I'm Korean!" he ran away. I was just frustrated by this.

 

           The reason that I have mentioned these two experiences is because it gave me a chance to look back at myself. From me being so passive not trying to learn English but try to look for tricks, I could learn that when I face some problems, I should not step back but try to get through it. And from the racism that I have experienced, it gave me a more broader perspective on how I look at people from different cultures. Even though I came back to Korea, these are so valuable experiences and I'm looking forward to experience more on my life in KMLA. Thank you.

Personal Narrative: My Mother

        On the backstage, I couldn't stop pounding of my heart, and my body kept shivering. It was the most nervous moment in my life. To relive my nervousness, I thought about the moments that my volunteering team practiced for this performance.

After few moments it was my team's turn to be on stage. As the leader of the team, I lead the team members to middle of the stage where all attention was focused. I started the performance with the strong beat of my drums. At that time, I put all my efforts and passion in to the rhythm making one piece of harmonized music.
Finally, it was all finished. My team got applause from the audiences and I was so proud and confident about myself that I actually accomplished this.
However, few months before, I wasn't the type of person who is very confident about myself. I was totally different, always depressed and had no enthusiasm.

 

        I was a normal boy who lives in Korea, and had a normal life as others but when my family decided to move to US my life got tangled. In the middle school, my grades were all low almost getting 'F', and I had no friends at all. This was so definite because I couldn't speak, write, read English as fluent as Americans which made me to act passive. As my exhausting school life continued for months, I almost got the blues. My mom was also worried about me. She wanted to help me out but it was hard to find a solution in a new environment.

 

        One day, my mother came to me and said "Since you like to volunteer for others, let's volunteer for people who need your help". I was concerned about myself 'Will I be able to volunteer in a foreign country?'.But on the next day, after hours of thinking, I decided to do it. My mother began to search for Koreans who are interested in volunteering to form a group. And as the oldest in that group, I got the position of team leader.

 

        My team practiced many performances such as taekwondo, and samulnori(Korean traditional music) for six months and the day came. After the performance, our team got famous by doing Korean traditional performances for volunteering. Many city newspapers and Korean broadcasting channel came to our group and started to interview. It was the best day in my life, and also the turning point to be confident about myself being passionate.

 

        Now, I'm so thankful to my mom who put so many effort for me to have self-confidence. And this couldn't be done without her help. This is my experience that I can't ever forget which gave me an opportunity to go beyond myself.

My goals!

In middle school, teachers put a lot of importance on reading and grammar, not writing. So, as other students do, I didn't spend much time on writing. However, by taking this writing class with Mr.Menard, I truly feel my English writing skill will enhance much better than now. Since, I know writing is crucial throughout the whole school life, I set three goals to accomplish before the end of this writing class.

 

1.

I will write with more advanced vocabularies.
When I write, I always concern about my vocabulary. Since, I didn't memorize many vocabularies as my friends do, I strongly feel that my essays are just weak and not influential. I want to write that is well-organized and more influential to others.
So, in the writing class, I will memorize more words and utilize it when I write essays.

2.

I will write faster than before.
I'm the type of person who thinks a lot before writing an essay. Because of this, I spend lots of time on thinking about the ideas and organizing it to make a perfect essay. However, this puts me in trouble when I have piles of works to finish and I still have some essays to finish.
So, my goal is to shorten the writing time, and have more organized essay.

3.

I will write with no grammatical errors.
When I re-read my writings, I find many grammatical errors on everywhere. But, even if I find those errors, I don't know how to fix it, and the correct way to fix it. This is the time when I feel so depressed about my work. I read some books about writing grammar but it was always hard for me to utilize the data from the book in to my writing.
Thus, my last goal in this writing class is to minimize my grammatical errors as possible.