我申請的大學錄取了
申請作文
3 lives in one
I have lived three lives in one.
A long time ago, in a very different time and country, my father would often grip my hand and take me on a long walk through our little neighborhood. Back then, everything and everyone was grey. The concrete houses, the surplus uniforms, the dust on the empty roads. I wasn’t bothered. My father provided me with everything that I wanted to see.
He’d point at decayed propaganda and explain the beauty of the individual words that composed them. He’d point ar the occasional songbird and the hints of color hidden in their drab feathers. He spoke to me about strange and varied worlds hidden behind paper pages, weaving tale after tale from novels that I cpuldn’t even read the word s of yet. But he’d be there, by my side, patient.
He told me of the Sun Wukong fighting the Bull Demon, of heroic bandits fighting for justice in a forgotten marsh, of Jia Bayou navigating the intricacies of urban life. I saw all I wanted out of the world from him, no matter the grey that laid around me. Wherever I went in life, I carried the stories he told me with him, the words he spoken buried deep in my heart. Through college, through my research, through my first steps outside of the country that I had been born, his words guided me.
Many years later, as I held my tiny son for the first time, it felt really did feel like another new life had begun. The immigrant experience is often spoken as a new chapter, a new life, in a metaphorical sense. But to me it was quite literal.
I didn’t speak English, well.
I didn’t have any friends in America.
I didn’t have a job waiting for me.
I didn’t go to a college that anybody would recognize, at least back then (it’s more well known now).
In China I had been a star engineer, a successful researcher. In America I was nothing. It wasn’t a new chapter so much as the book rewritten again.
And so I studied. I attended courses at a community college, partially just to get used to English. I did classes online, I got certifications. I landed my first engineering job, again. I jumped positions, grew my pay. I had started again, and so I grew again.
Things changed. Sometimes my life was exciting, but sometimes the days would drag on as I went to the office again and again. Grey, like days of my childhood.
And I remembered what my father did for me, a ;one time age. When he picked up my hand and help me see the splash of color behind the drab shell of routine, the beauty in even the faded words of an old poster. There was something wonderful for me to find in life, no matter where I went.
So now, as my second part of my life comes to a close, I begin my third. I wonder what kind of person I’ll get to be this time around.
