Tumpa Mira
I always suffer from a mental panic attack when people ask me to write about my life. It’s a rather simple task, but from my reaction you’d think that I was being asked to solve world hunger on top of curing cancer. I guess the best place to start in these situations is from the beginning…
I was born on January 10th, 1991 at Holy Cross Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I spent most of my childhood with my grandparents and aunts, because let’s admit it, we all know grandparents can never say “no” to anything you want. I went to Oxford Nursery School when I was four and even got an award for reciting a poem in front of an audience without fidgeting. (Yes, sad though it may be, this is one of the few landmark accomplishments in my life.)
Since I was the first grandchild on my mom’s side of the family, I was the perpetual center of attention and love. This all changed when my parents won the Diversity Visa Lottery and my parents decided to immigrate to the United States in the summer of 1996. When we first came here we lived with my dad’s friends and knew absolutely no one except for a handful of people. I was faced with the challenge of assimilating into the American way of life and creating a new identity that merged together both my Bengali past and my American future.
I was extremely quiet in school because I didn’t speak English, but my teacher misunderstood this for shyness and never sent me to ESL. Everything was going as well as it possibly could until my parents dropped the “baby brother bomb” on me. I remember crystal-clear the day my dad took me to visit the new addition to the family. My brother was red, looked like a bug, and did absolutely nothing but sleep. I tried to get along with him when my mom finally brought him home, but because he was so boring, I attempted many times to sell him to my neighbors for a very reasonable price. To my great distress, all the neighbors I sold my brother to brought him back at the end of the day. As the years passed, I had no choice but to develop immunity against the annoyance and idiocy that is the very embodiment of my brother.
I eventually went on to go to Daniel Carter Beard Junior High School and then Townsend Harris High School, both within just blocks of my home in Flushing, Queens. I am now a freshman at Brooklyn College doubling in English/Religion with plans of becoming a doctor. I grew up in an extremely diverse neighborhood with cultures from every crevice of the globe. Coming to Brooklyn for college has been an enlightening experience because this is my first time being exposed to a heavily populated African American and Jewish neighborhood. However, because I have spent the majority of my youth in a salad bowl of mixing cultures, I find it easier to integrate with people from other cultures now in my adulthood.
When asked about what it means to be a New Yorker, I think of minute details that distinguish us from all other people. Only New Yorkers change their food orders in the most absurd manner, only New Yorkers can curse with every other word and still make it sound absolutely normal, only New Yorkers can make purple hair and orange jeans the latest fad, and only New Yorkers can pass an Asian man and a Black woman holding hands without going into shock. New Yorkers have the distinct ability of absorbing and harmonizing with the rainbow of cultures, languages, and customs that impregnate the very air they breathe. New York is without a doubt the cultural hubbub of the world. It is the only place where the utmost outrageous ideas can be nurtured and the impossible can be transformed into reality. I am darn proud to be a New Yorker!
Gotta write this!