Political

Political problems.

                        Have you ever had family members that belonged to a political group organization in any country? Do you know how it feels to have most of your family involved in politics? This  is my story. I was born into a family that had political connections and an organization that my uncle just has in Guinea. Before my uncle started his political groups, our family used   to be a happy family. However, my family fell a part because of his activities with the government of Guinea. My uncle was the leader of the RPG, which stands for Rassemblement du People of Guinea. My family belonged to that one political group organization in my country, and this relationship to the R P G had profound effects on   my family.

In   the 1990’s my uncle was arrested and imprisoned by the Guinean government. I believed that was because he was trying to change the country. His political program was focused on the Guinean, economy and the development of Guinea. The reason why he was focusing on those elements was because the country has all the natural resource but the population was poor. He mission was to focus on the development of Guinea. Because we needed it at that time. Since Guinea became independent in 1954, the country only had two presidents. Because they were selfish and they did not care about welfare of their citizens, he started talking about the economy in Guinea, but no one was willing to consider his word.  Guinea Conakry supplies water to all of African continent and the country is very rich in natural resources; he wanted to changes many things which would have benefits people in Guinea. Somehow, the government found it out that my father was the financial supporter of my uncle activities, so they came after him. The reason why my father was helping my uncle was because my uncle had the vision for the development of Guinea .However my father had opportunity to help the country, and he love his country; He also had the money to give him.

When the government came after my father, they arrested him and later they killed by Guinean government. There is nothing that my mother can do about it, so she became depressed, and she became ill. My aunt take care us while my mother were sick. I was only too young when it happened. Now the only thing I know that my uncle was a politician, and my father was his financial supporter .Now I know what it means to be a politician in Africa because it means putting your family in danger. For example Celiou   Dalien Diallo now is running for president in Guinea. In 2008, he was beaten almost to death and sent to France, later that night the military armed came after he family while he was at hospital in France.

Another consequence of my uncle involvement was that my father young sister was arrested too and sent to prison. However, she managed to escape from the prison. Finally, my family was exiled to Senegal. After my family had the problems with the government. And my father was killed, my uncle still in prison. That meant, we did not families have anybody to stay with in Guinea. My mother, my aunt and my other five siblings went to Senegal to stay with my mother family. Since my mother was born in Senegal capital Dakar and she still has family there it was perfect place for us to live. Thankfully my aunt was there to take care of us, while mother was sick. My brothers and sisters and I went to school in Dakar. My aunt left us with our mother and she went to Europe. Three years later, she got my oldest sister a visa. I believed they worked extra hard to bring my oldest brother and me. Unfortunately, not all my siblings have been lucky an enough to go to Europe. We still have two more there in Senegal, because it is hard to get a visa now.

In conclusion, these political connections meant that my family experienced an inordinate amount of beating, and killing that effect our childhood.  I think that our family fears harm or mistreatment if we return to Guinea. We don’t have anything to do in Guinea. Unfortunately, we still have my young brother and my young sister in Dakar. My uncle was released in December 2003and he is now running a business in Senegal. He is no longer a politician. We all hope, however my country will become better country in the future.

Reflection of ‘Red Azalea’

I prefer ‘Red Azalea’ than ‘The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’. Actually, I can’t compare those two books for ‘Red Azalea’ is much better than the other one. When I read ‘The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’, I couldn’t feel any interesting facts. It was extremely ordinary book to me. I just read the book for finish my homework. The story couldn’t reach of my expectation. On the other hand, I couldn’t stop reading ‘Red Azalea’. It was very interesting book, and I learned many things about china’s history. Sometimes, the author made me happy and sad. Her un-normal experiences made her strong and smart. That’s why I really love her character. There are bunch of difficult word, which I have never seen, but I just ignored difficult words and I kept reading. I really love to read like books, magazines and newspaper. I would keep reading until I understand books without dictionary.

Donna Krol
ESL 100 (Writing First)
November 26, 2010

Final Reflection – Funny in Farsi

I like better book “Funny in Farsi” than “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”. I feel closer to the author Firoozeh Dumas. I experienced so many similar situations to her life in the USA as an immigrant. From perspective some of them now look funny but at that time incidents felt more like tragedy. In first book I learned about life in Botswana which was very interesting. I didn’t know much about Africa, so it was very enlightening for me. I learned many interesting episodes from life of Mma Ramotswe, first lady detective in her country. Everything for me was very exotic. However book “Funny in Farsi” is closer to my heart. For many people of different nationality life of Firoozeh in the U.S. is somehow familiar. I think a lot of immigrants experienced alike situations. Book was fascinating and written with humor, which is a big advantage.
Those two books are very diverse from what I used to read. When I was at school, I had to read book assigned by a teachers. Those books were written by classic writers and poets from different countries. They were meant to teach us about history of literature of the world. I hated Greek tragedies like “Antigone” by Sophocles and I hated Shakespeare, because of old, hard to understand language. My first book in English when I came to Chicago was “Islands of the Stream” by Earnest Hemmingway, when I learned spelling of all bad words. For my pleasure I was reading mysteries and romances.
I don’t have much time for reading books but I love to read magazines like “National Geographic”, “Prevention”, and ladies journals. If I have to read book assigned in school I will do it gladly. I know that I learn something new and interesting.

Interpreter of maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The book  “Interpreter of maladies “by Jhumpa Lahiri left me with a nice, puzzled impression, which is the aim of the author – to make you think about simple and at the same time incomprehensible meaning of the life. Even though the book consists of different small stories, they are all connected together, and the last story explains more about Lahiri’s point of view on life and relationship between people. In all stories Lahiri writes about Indian people connected to the American culture. The author describes characters and events through the eyes of one character. The interesting thing is that those character usually a man. The author of the book, Indian origin, goes deep into her main character’s thoughts and feeling, revealing his, sometimes uncomfortable and frustrating, inner world. Lahiry pay a lot of attention on the most ordinary, subtle thoughts and fears, which occurs in the head of the main characters. She is bringing the unsweetened inner micro cosmoses of the  main characters, showing their  doubts and mental struggle to understand and except the world and people around them.  As I was reading the stories, I didn’t stop to be surprised and captured by the accuracy of Lahiry observation of man’s thoughts and behavior. Sometimes it was really frustrating for me  to realized that I also have similar experience in life, besides I don’t know what kind of thoughts my husband has. I noticed that the main characters usually possessed strengs, but at the same time they very weak and don’t know what love is, they see their spouse like a stranger, intruder in their life, however excepting them altogether like a necessary, inevitable event in life, similar to death or a birth. The most disappointing part in all the stories for me was an absence of any romantic feelings, passion, or attraction of characters to each other. Such attitude related to the peculiarities of Indian Culture, to the Hindu religion of acceptance and not questioning your destiny, life and circumstances.   The man, like a main character, also is the clever way to show the male dominance in Indian culture. Women’s happiness and wellbeing depends on man, and it makes man’s doubts and weaknesses loom bigger in the eyes of the reader.  

Funny in Farsi

Author used humorous writing skill to tell us what her life is. The stories in her life are funny. They always made me laugh. I also felt there is so much love and happy in her life. It is a great book for people who immigrated to the United States and learning English, like me. Through the book, I was not only reading a funny story, but also let me got a model of how to handle two cultures when they were shocking. Reader can have fun to know more about American culture and immigrants’ experiences from reading this book.

Interpreter of maladies

Interpreter of melodies
The book the Interpreter of melodies is constructed of many short depressing stories which are based on true life. Although, all the stories that I read were very impressive the one that interested me the most was “The treatment of Bibi Holder”. The story began describing how Bibi Holder suffered from an ailment, which no one was able to cure or figure out. In the book Bibi was also described as a woman who had lost her father and was living and sleeping in the corridor from the Holder Family. One day the Holder Family toked het to one of the best doctors, and the doctor said that all she needed to be cure was a husband. After that Bibi was taught how to talk to man, but she was never able to find one. Soon after tha,t the family which she use to live with abandon her, At the end of the story Bibi became a single mother and was happy at last, although the father of the baby remain a mystery.

The Joy Luck Club

The book ”The Joy Luck Club” written by Amy Tam talks about four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and 'say' stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. I enjoyed this book immensely. All four of the mothers had such high hopes for their daughters that they wouldn’t have to deal with any of the disasters to survive in their childhoods. It was so interesting. Then, their daughters thought of their mothers’ old-fashioned, old school Chinese ways; how they felt they could never live up to their mothers’ high expectations and creating incredible internal conflicts for all four daughters. This is the first book of Amy tam that I have read, and I really enjoyed the way she wrote it, or may because I am also Chinese. But sometimes the book seems a little bore. It totally talks about common lift of people. I still recommend this people for college students. It is easy to understand and close to lift.

The job luck club review

The book “The Joy luck club” by Amy Tam review about four woman and their daughters in “The joy luck club” and telling how to guide each other in in America. When I first time to read the book, it was not easy to understand because I didn’t who was talking about the story. After you read a few page, you could easy to understand what was talking about. The major purpose of the book is telling the culture between China and America. At the begin of four stories, they always statement their relationship whit mother and daughter. Women all will think about the future of their as a mother. They might think what their children do and teach what they do. In the story, they created a club in America, they party among themselves, play mahjong, and share secrets and gossips about their lives and other things. At the end, this is a good book for book club; it is not too hard and not too easy. If you understand some Chinese world and name in the story, you might easy to understand it.

One Decison

One Decision

“Why we are not living in china if we are Chinese?” It was the question that my brother asked my grandmother some years ago when I was in junior high school. My grandparents’ parents are originally from China, and they moved to Indonesia because they thought that in Indonesia they may have a better life than in China. However around the 1960s, there was a huge moment for Chinese-Indonesians that changed their lives. At that time, there was a war between Chinese-Indonesians and native Indonesians. The rumor was that many Indonesians didn’t like Chinese immigrants; they were envious because Chinese-Indonesians could have better jobs than them. Furthermore, the Indonesian government sent out a warning that all Chinese-Indonesians have to go back to China within a week. On the day that my grandparents were going to leave, there was an announcement from the USA that Indonesian government was not fair and should not make a decision without a clear explanation. The US governments believed that Chinese-Indonesian should be treated equally and have the same rights like the native Indonesian citizens. therefore, the rest of Chinese immigrants who had not gone back to China could prefer either to go back to China or to live in Indonesia. However, if they decided to stay in Indonesia, the Indonesian government could not guarantee their security and safety. My grandparents decided to stay in Indonesia because going back to China meant starting from “zero” because they had nothing over there. From this point forward, my grandparents’ decision has affected our family’s life.

We lost ome family members because of my grandparents’ decision. My grandfather has two sisters that were already married and have children in 1960s. When there was an announcement that Chinese had to go back to China within one week, all of my grandfather’s family had decided it to go back to China. Everything was already planned; my grandfather’s sisters would be going first and my grandfather would go the next day after them because he needed to take care his business before he went. However because of the US announcement, my grandparents decided to stay in Indonesia which meant that they could lose contact with their families. My grandfather didn’t know where his sisters were in China. His sisters’ family who moved to China had nothing over there, there is no house and business/job. Furthermore, there was no technology for communication at that time. Now, it has been a half of century since they went back to China, yet my grandfather still never heard news about his sisters or their whereabouts.

The worst effect of this policy for Chinese-Indonesians happened in June 1998. At that time, the situation for the Indonesian government was really bad. They couldn’t control the native Indonesian communities. This was a big chance for Indonesians to discriminate against Chinese immigrants. They went crazy and became really violent; they burnt Chinese immigrant’s houses and cars, killed Chinese-Indonesians, robbed things that were in the houses and stores, and raped the women. I was seven years old at that time and I remember seeing a lot of smoke around my house area from my balcony. I also heard news from my father and neighbors that a lot of bad things happened around my neighborhood. Luckily, all of my family lived in the safe area, so we survived. However, we had a big traumatic experience from that has been hard to forget.

My family can’t speak Chinese language. Before 2001, there isn’t any Chinese course in Indonesia even though there are a lot of Chinese immigrants over there but no one was allowed to teach or learn the Chinese language. The reason the Indonesia government closed down the Chinese courses, even the small Chinese courses, was because they don’t want to have more Chinese culture spreading around Indonesia. However in 2001, there was finally a change. The new government gave permission to open some small Chinese courses. In the following years there are a lot of big and small Chinese courses in Indonesia; it even spread to some schools. I finally got a chance to have Chinese lesson when I still lived in Indonesia. Even though it was just the basic lesson, I am still grateful to see part of my culture finally come out of the shadow. Right now, even though none of my family can speak Chinese fluently, but all my younger cousins and sister are still learning it at school. My older cousins and brother is the same thing like me, just know the basic. My parents, my uncles and aunts have already felt tired to study so it meant that they won’t be able to learn to speak Chinese.

In conclusion, Indonesia is a beautiful country that has a lot of natural resources; everything is also cheap over there such as worker and life expenses. Those were the reasons why Chinese wanted to stay over there. However, we never expected that native Indonesia could do crazy things like that to us. That moment has become part of history and life changing experience that will be hard to be forgotten. Luckily, things have changed as there is less discrimination to Chinese-Indonesian. But the wound is still there and it is hard for Chinese-Indonesian to be completely healed from that traumatic tragedy. This is the reason why some of my families have decided to rather spend the rest of their life in United States than in Indonesia.

One Child, Unlimited Burden

Many people said that people who were born after the 1980s were the beginning of a nightmare. This is because in the 1970s in China, the government had a new policy, which was to promote that one couple have only one child. The emergence of this policy affected everyone after 1980’s. In the old society, every average family had four children, so China had become the most populous country in the world. This family planning was ordered to control population growth so that it can improve the living standards and economic prosperity. After this policy was fully implemented, it really influenced a lot of Chinese people who were born after 1980. I was born after 1980, so has this policy influenced me a lot lack of affection, personality and pressure.
First of all, when the family planning was implemented, it let me feel the lack of affection and gave me too much special attention. Each family could have one child, and my family was no exception. My parents only have me. This began my lonely childhood. Since I was conscious that I knew I do not have any brothers or sisters, I realized I had nobody to play with me. In fact, I just played with dolls solitarily and played multiple roles by myself every day. This has caused me never know how to share anything with others in my life. It is because as the only child of my parents and grandparents, they have always treated me as a precious pearl. Without any siblings to share their love, I have been as “a little queen” in this family. They have always helped me do anything and make concessions for me. Specifically, they helped me to wash the clothes all the time. As a result, when I was thirteen years old, I still did not know how to wash my clothes. The whole family spoiled me such as the small flower in a greenhouse. This didn’t allow me to learn to be independent.

Moreover, this policy has always made me have some problems with my personality. Growing up, I began to have my own social circles and began to have a boyfriend. Nevertheless, we haven’t known how to tolerate or get along with each other. We have always had a lot of arguments when we got together. It is because we both grew up in one child family. Sometimes we have hurt each other because we have treated everything with apathy and we had mood swings such as a change in the weather, sometimes sunny and sometimes rainy. In love, I have always liked to do what I want; I haven’t cared about him a lot. We both have been self- centered people; and have had a hard time considering the other. We plan to get married and have a child in the future, but if we keep going in this situation, we will divorce and this will not be good for our child. This problem cannot be ignored.
Finally, this policy has given me a lot of family stress. In the future, if I get married, my family will become a”421” family which has become popular family style since 1980s. A “421” family means my parents, my parents in-law, my husband, my child and me in the family. We only have one child, so we will have high expectations for him/her. Having a good job is very important to my husband and me because we will be the ones to take care of the burden of family maintenance. We need to make a lot of money to let our child get into top school and have a good education in the future. Therefore, my husband and I have to assume all the cost of this family. We have to consider a lot, not only give them a good living condition but also the mortgage of the house and cars. This is as a heavy cloth wrapper. It is endless. We both are in one child families, so no any siblings can share this great responsibility.

In conclusion, after this one child policy was implemented, it always has given Chinese who were born after 1980s a lot of problems. When numerous problems arise, I as most people who were born after 1980’s, haven’t wanted to grow up and I hope I can always live under the protection of our parents. Indeed, family planning was the burden for the previous generation, but at the same time, it brings a heavier burden to next generation. Many of our generation have lost confidence in our life and love. I hope this legislation will change so that it can solve many lonely childhoods, character effects and family pressure. Let us live more exciting lives.

Things Will Change

In 1975, many people were unemployed because of the bad economy in Brazil. At the time, my family`s restaurant had money problems, and because of that my family had to lower the prices to attract more people to come.. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil went through a period of high inflation, and because of that, the government decided to change the money plan from the cruzeiro to the real. After the new currency, Brazil started has a better job market and economy. The change in currency helped my family business, helped my family to attain their needs, and helped my relatives to get a better life.

When the currency changed, my family had more money to invest in the business. But before the currency changed, the job market and the economy were so bad. My family tried in so many ways to keep the restaurant running, such as lowering the prices, passing out the flyers, and making advertisements in the news paper. We eventually attracted some people to the restaurant. After the money plan changed from cruzeiro to real, my family took advantage of it to earn money in the restaurant. Then, they became more successful after the economy changed. They also had the chance to expand their restaurant.

In addition, before the currency changed, my family had to borrow money from my uncle and aunt to pay the electricity, gas and water for the restaurant. The money that we borrowed from my uncle and aunt did not only help us in the expenses for the restaurant, but in our daily needs also. After the money changed from the cruzeiro to the real, my family started to earn money from the restaurant. Due to that reason, my family`s finances got better, and were be able to pay back to my uncle and aunt. Eventually, my family got extra money for our daily needs.
On other hand, even though my family had financial problems, my relatives started to lose their jobs because of the bad economic situation at that time. Before the currency changed, most of my relatives were working at the restaurant as waiters, cooks or bus boys. Since the economy was bad and many people were unemployed, people chose to eat at home instead of in restaurants. After Brazil changed the money from cruzeiro to real, things started to get better for my relatives. More companies started hire people who were unemployed. As a result, most of my relatives got back their job as waiters,

and cooks.

During this time, my family took the benefits of the new currency to work hard in the restaurant in order to earn more money. Indeed, this really helped my family and my relatives with the financial problems. That also brought my family and my relative a better life too because it gave us a stable life and improvement in the business. I am so proud of them for doing well in their business and maintaining a better life. Otherwise, I wouldn`t feel as happy as I am now.

Struggle

Serbia is a small country in Eastern Europe, and for me it has always been recognized in the world for sports. However, talking with foreign people since I came into the U.S., what identifies Serbia for them is war. No matter how hard it is for me to accept that, when I really think about, it might be the truth. Through history, Serbia has been involved in so many wars. Only during my lifetime in Serbia, which was the member of the former Yugoslavia, the country passed through two wars. One of them happened in a neighboring country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the second one we could feel on our land. Although it was not directly on our territory, the first one affected my family and me more. That war and the consequences during and after the war put fear in all of us, and made my family struggle for the food and money for a couple of years.

As a child, the first thing that was on my mind talking about the war was my father. What if he has to go there? I thought as a kid, I still didn't know that much about it, but I was old enough to see what was going on on the TV, what people can do to each other. Just in the beginning of the war, my family and I visited our relatives, who lived right on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country where the war started. The war was going on literally just over the hill. At night when everything became quiet, we could hear the bombs and the guns shooting. It was so scary. I knew people that went to war and never came back. My great-grandfather was a member of The Second World War. He was held in Germany for a couple of years even after the war ended. He came back home after all of my family thought that he was dead. That's why I was afraid. I was aware that if my father went over there, I could never see him again.

During that war and a long time after it, we had to deal with the devaluation of the currency. At that time, Serbia was the only country in the world where every citizen was a multi-millionaire. However, you couldn't even buy bread with those millions. The value of currency was changing every day. It would happen that people had to work the whole month for only ten dollars. I remember one day when our cousin visited us, he gave me some money to buy whatever I wanted. Even though I usually kept all money that I received from the others, I decided to go and buy something. I bought a big box of chocolate, but I guess I picked the wrong day. My mother wanted to kill me. Probably because the day after we could have bought ten of those. I just couldn't understand that. Some people took advantage of that situation and became rich, but many, like my family, didn't. Like a lot of other people, we had to struggle for months, even years.

Finally, what follows every war is the lack of food and the rest of the things that you need for normal life like gas and clothing. It is not that we really didn’t have enough to eat or that we had to suffer, but it was very hard to get to buy a bread or oil for example. There was a specific time during the day when they would deliver bread in the stores, so we had to wait in a line for maybe an hour or even two in order to get it. For oil, we had to wait for even couple of days. Besides that, stores were empty. There were not more than ten to fifteen articles that you could buy in the whole store. We also had to wait in a line to buy gas. Lines were long for miles. It was not easy and our borders were closed, so we couldn’t go out of country in order to get what we need. Therefore, some people started buying and selling on the black market because that was the only way for them to survive and help us survive as well.

In summary, can war bring you anything good? Definitely not! I felt it twice. I was scared like never before, and I hope I will never have to struggle with it again. Instead of playing at the playground or doing homework, I was spending my free time with my friends in the line for bread, oil or milk, cheering up other kids whose fathers were in the war. For me that war was just a sick game of three people, the leaders who wanted to take advantage of something that other countries had, and his country hadn’t. A game where thousands of people were killed and thousands of lives were destroyed. It took so many years for Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to recover after the war. I would not wish that to even my worst enemy.

Money or Love

Some got fired, some got divorced, and some committed suicide. All these events occurred from 1997 to 2002 in South Korea because of the severe economic crisis. Since Korea became one of the most developed countries in the world, Koreans have been able to live better than before, but they should have had a self-restraint. They opened a champagne bottle too soon. Then, the government of Republic of Korea had to borrow money to get help from IMF (International Monetary Fund). Meanwhile, everybody was in a difficult situation except my family. Fortunately, my father had a communication service business which was not affected by the IMF crisis, but he earned more money than others. An ironic benefit of the crisis was that my family could move from a small house to a big and fancy apartment. The changes were not only about the house but about also my relationships among my family members. In fact, paradoxically my family connections become loose because of our increased wealth.

One change was the cold atmosphere that surrounded my father and me. Although I have many similarities with my father, we do not care much about each other. When I was nine years old, he started his own business instead of working at Samsung Corporation. Since that time, I have hardly had a conversation with my father. Frankly speaking, I believed that he took advantage of his business as an excuse to escape from my family when he was too busy to talk. His strong willingness of success was derived from his upbringing. My father, who was born as the youngest child in a poor farmer family, did not have any academic support from his parents. He fed cows and cultivated land day and night, but he also studied hard for his dream. Finally, he accomplished his desire, yet he would never stop. After the IMF crisis gave us a high status, he switched his business from the communication service to an alcohol corporation. As he took a different regional business over, my family had to move to a strange place. Even though I understood him and his background, his dogmatic decision did not make sense at all. My family members abandoned all our acquaintances just to chase more money. From the moment my family moved to a new and big place, the situation was getting worse. My father came home late because of his business, so my relationship with him has started to deteriorate. In addition, it affected my relationship between my father and my mother as well.

My mother and I are connected by a burning string. I think that she reflects her dreams to me and hopes to get a substitute satisfaction. Because my mother was also raised with the same status as my father, she wanted to run away from poverty. She went to the College of Education to become a teacher instead of becoming a designer because she did not have enough money to do so. However, she did overwhelmingly well at both her work and household, and she supported my family until my father had success. Before she had to quit her job due to my father’s request, she was an enthusiastic, confident, wise, and hard-working mother when she was an elementary-school teacher. My father cared a lot about the social reputation that he needed my mother as a housewife. Then, she flipped from a professional teacher to a typical soccer mom. She kept talking about her heyday and regretted quitting job, so she gave me pressure to be what she wanted to. Hence, I was forced to enter an expensive private women’s university which was well known as the community of respectable families’ daughter. The college was located in Seoul, which meant I could no longer be with my family, so my only time to meet my family was on weekends and vacations. As a matter of fact, the distant problem affected the relationship between my brother and me.

Although there are occasional problems, a rubber band connects my brother and me. My brother, who is three years younger than me, was a weak, dependant, and good-hearted child when we were in elementary school. Because both of my parents were working, I have looked after him since I remember. I had done everything I possibly could for him by the time we left our hometown. My brother and I spent our time separately at different private educational institutions. As a result, I had no idea about my brother’s trouble or worries. Then, when I graduated from high school, I barely saw him. Furthermore, “Out of sight, out of mind.” Even though we are siblings and are connected with a durable rubber band, it is hard to catch up with him due to the long distance between Korea and the United States. Now, he is performing his obligatory military service, and I am studying in the United States, which is fourteen hours by airplane from Korea. I am sure that he must have hard time in the army, but we have only talked by phone two times since I came to Chicago.

Fortunately, as time goes by, all my members of family do realize what the problems are, and we are trying to recover our relationships. My family circumstance makes me think about the Japanese cartoon “GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka)” which is about unpredictable teacher Onizuka. One of his students had a similar problem as mine, so he went to her house, and broke the wall between her father and her mother’s room with a huge hammer. The story was ridiculous, but it gave me a lesson that I had a responsibility to make a daring decision. I should have not let everything have its own way but recovered my family relationships. Even if I cannot go back to my memory, which is at my small and wooden floor house with a trifoliate orange tree and eating baked sweet potatoes with all my family together, I will do my best to bring my family together again.

Tomorrow will be better

All Asian people remember the year, 1997, the year of Asian Financial Crisis. Thirteen years ago, it was just like a hurricane that hit various Asian countries. Hong Kong was also been involved in the storm. When the stock market collapsed, the property bubble exploded, and the economy declined, sudddenly, it seemed that my family fells down from a cliff which named "rich". We lost the only house we had, and need to rent out instead, we also lost a lot of from stock. The crisis has changed oure life, it gaves us a big charllenge; Although we have had a hard time, we final passed it through.
In the several years after 1997, I've been moved three times, from the east to the west of town or my mother town to another one. In each time my friends were shocked, "Oh you are moving again?" They didn't really try to remember my home address because they knew somewhen it may change again. Of course I didn't feel good with this, but I had no choice. Because of the crisis, the bubble of the property was inevitably exploded. The value of those property, included ours, fell down like a despairing man jump off from thirteen floor. Our house dropped from 2.2 million HKD to the final 0.8 million. When we sold it, because my parent was still paying for it, we became one of the hundred-thousand negative equities. We needed to rent a house to live after paying back all the money to the bank, sometimes we even needed to stay in my grandparent's home. At first I had bad feeling about living in others place. But Dad told me, "It's the reality, you need to face it instead of escape." I tried to get with the situation, tried to change another way to think. Knew that I'm not the only one who are being affected, I finally can dealt with it normally. Then after these years, we moved into a new bought house in the new town.


During these years, I got used to living as a basic-level citizen. Before that stormy year, my family was a part of the bourgeoisie; Nevertheless, the stock market was been destroyed, where my parent had invested a lot of money. At that time, the major index - just like what happened in property market - had been evaporated by at least seventy percent. Like many others, parent lost a big part of their saving. I needed to control my expenses, and buy as little as possible. Compared to my friedns, I had less time on having dinner outside, I bought fewer new clothes and spend less time on hanging out. You may think that was poor, yet I think it was a meaningful experience. Even if I had not much material life than the others, at least I'd learned how to save money and knew the advantage of being frugal. In addition, now I know how to dress up nice and beautifully with paying less money.

The biggest effect of the crisis was the harm of economy. For a long period of time people, including my family and me, were living under the great pressure of depression. When we turned on the televison, the bad news were everywhere and everyday. Uncontable shops were closed up, companies went into bankruptcy, and high umemployment rate had been leasted for many years. My father was in a good condition of a factory in the mainland China, mother was a normal staff in a company, the effect of depression was pestering them eveyday. They didn't know if they will be the next new members of unemployed. Fortunately, they were save. Though my father now get less pay than before, we think we were not as poor as we thought.
If I can turn back time, I'm sure I'd avoid to live like these years, no one want to get trouble. But for sure, sometimes trouble can makes one who become mature. Now the crisis became a part of history, although it was a nightmare, yet people won't forget it. My family, and everyone who had experienced those hard years, will remember how they overcome such a nightmarish time doughtily.