Moving from `cool kid' to `foreign kid'.

• Author: Fong, Jonathan
• Position: Voices - Taiwanese student - Brief Article

MAHWAH, NEW JERSEY -- The flight from a little island named Taiwan, my beloved country, to the United States turned my life upside down.

Four years ago, my mother sent me to live in the U.S. with my older brother to get a better education. It was extremely difficult for me to leave my friends and my surroundings.

My first year here was awful. I started everything over. I changed my name from Fong Young to Jonathan Fong. I had to learn a new language that I had never seen before, try to make new friends when I could not even understand them, and do schoolwork with a bunch of ABC's.

I could not make a friend. My grades fell off. In Taiwan, I was the cool one, the student who was popular, who loved dances, and who was a very outgoing person. But my label in the U.S. changed. I became "a foreign kid who was boring and didn't even speak English."

Some people said these remarks in front of me. They thought I could not understand them, and they thought they could just make me an outcast. Yes, I did understand them--I started to get the hang of English after a few months. I just did not bother to be friends with such people.

Outside of changes at school, moving to the U.S. gave me a clearer perspective on Taiwan's relations with the world. Frankly, they are not so great. Taiwan is occasionally harassed by its neighbor, China. Taiwan and China each have a different identity: One is democratic, and one is Communist. Taiwan has a much higher per capita gross domestic product...