Finished Reading the Harry Potter series... Resolution finished!
Who Am I?
I am an undergraduate student at Brooklyn College, currently pursuing a degree in Accounting, on the CPA track. I can't say that this is hundred percent since it's still pretty early in my college career. Other interests to pursue have definitely popped into my head for consideration from time to time, but for now, I'm sticking to Accounting. I guess before I can commit to a major, I have to find my meaning in life first.
How I Became A New Yorker
How does one become a New Yorker? Are there special rules and specifications to which you have to conform to in order to be called a New Yorker? In my case, I always considered myself a New Yorker simply for being born and growing up in the state. New York City has been my home for the whole of my life, and I’ve never lived in any other state or another country for a prolonged period of time. But when you think about it, being a New Yorker might delve into something deeper than physically being on New York soil.
Just this morning when I was making my way to the bus stop, I was thinking about this particular essay assignment. I looked around and really, for the first time, took special notice to the multitude of ethnicities of everyone hustling and bustling in the morning rush. Growing up in a place like New York, the multi-ethnic interaction between everyone just becomes a part of life and it’s just an everyday thing that no one pays much attention to anymore. But it is ethnicity that can help define a New Yorker as well. Everyone has their own story and ancestral background. The coming together of all the different types of cultural backgrounds has made New York the place that it is today.
Ethnically speaking, I am part of the Chinese-American population in the U.S. Both of my maternal and paternal ancestral lines date back to China. However, I don’t know exactly from which region. My paternal grandparents met in China and got married. It was there they had their first three children, all of whom were boys and my father being the second oldest. When my father was about two or three years old, they moved from China to Burma, which is present day Myanmar. It was there that my grandparents had three more children (two girls and another boy), and where my father grew up. Presently, he has this “old” quality to him, in the sense that he likes to tell me and my sister stories of life back in Burma, kind of like the “when I was your age…” types of stories. The ones that we’ve heard span from him playing soccer in the rain to stealing mangoes from the neighbor’s trees, and probably the most repetitive one would be about playing with a variety of insects and animals back in Burma. From what I know, my father’s family did pretty financially up till my grandfather’s death. In Burma, they owned a garment factory, which may not be much now, but was a good source of income at the time. Like I said, everything was perfect until my grandfather’s death, which led to the factory closing, due to lack of management, and the loss of the family’s only source of income. With this, my father was forced to leave school (which was around the time of age 18) and look for a job. This led to his leaving Burma to go back to China for a couple of years, and the ultimate reason he came to the U.S. He came to New York because he already had friends who were here, whom were willing to help him along. One of whom, was actually my mother.
My Tree
Now, my mother’s story was similar. My maternal grandparents had moved to Burma from China as well. My mother was born in Burma and grew up there with her two brothers and sister. As opposed to my father’s childhood, my mother’s was a little less “free”, so to speak, as her mother was a little more overprotective of her children. Ultimately, she came to the U.S. as well for in search of economic opportunities, and the need to earn a living for her family. She immigrated here a couple of years before my father did, and it was here where she met her godmother, who is now my great-godmother, and it was her godmother that helped her out while she was here in New York.
So, after my dad arrived in New York, which was sometime around 1981, it was shortly after that when my parents started dating. Both sides of my family knew each other back in Burma, so there weren’t exactly strangers to one another. A year later, they got married and rented an apartment in Brooklyn, not that far from where I live now. I think it was about 10-20 blocks away. It wasn’t until 1987, five years after getting married until they gave birth to my sister. In the time in between, they worked and saved as much money as they could, while having the burden of sending money back to their families back in Burma. And in January 1989, I was born. By which time, my parents had bought the house in which we still reside. That was basically how I was born into the “New Yorker” title.
