Opening for Ed Narrative – ZiXuan Wu

The horizon blazed over the surface of the Earth as my plane flew me to a most unfamiliar place. This is how I moved to America. This is how I survived in a world, where I didn’t speak it’s language, or read it’s words. I was only seven when I had moved to America, and my mother and father were also unfamiliar with it’s language. I remember my father saying, “Don’t worry, this place is better than where we came from. We just need to work hard to learn how to live here.” Walking out of the airport, I was greeted by new buildings. Weathered bricks and cigarette smoke seemed to fill the air with a pungency that I had never experienced back in China.

Later that day, when we first moved into our new house, it was a bit larger than the one we had in China. We were still very poor, and the house was by no means spacious, and in fact was most likely dirty and unkept. Dust covered walls and floors that creaked with every step. But I digress, because I wanted to learn language in order to adapt to this new world that I had been placed into. Learning a new language was hard, having to override what I had already knew about the Chinese language, and was left behind by my peers in my class. No one else really knew my language except for one person in the same situation named Thomas. He was my best friend, who seemed to struggle just as much as I did, but always seemed to have this determination to him that made him seem so reliable and trustworthy, despite his lack of English as well, we understood each other.