The World I Come From
Growing up as a kid, I never felt like I belonged within any group of people. My family and I are of Chinese heritage, although I was born in the Eastern European country of Hungary. From these simple origins, it created several obstacles in my life that my parents and I had not foreseen. With that said, let me tell you about the story of where I came from.
The intriguing thing about my birth is that I was not supposed to exist in the first place. Being from China, and already having my older sister, my parents had to make a decision when my pregnancy became apparent to them. In China, due to overpopulation in certain areas, there was a one child policy at the time of my conception. Thanks to my mother, who had no intention of losing a son, we were flown out to Hungary while I was in the womb for the main reason of making sure I would not be seized by the state or something worse at the time of my birth. At first, I never realized why I was born in Hungary, and my mother never told me why, even to this day. With little hints presented to me throughout my life, I began to put the pieces together, and I am forever grateful to my parents for the tough decision they made.
I spent the first four years of my life in Hungary, occasionally spending time back in China to see family of my parents. When I was about 4 years old, we moved to America due to a type of work visa. My father and sister were already in America prior to my mother and I due to my father’s work visa. At that time of our move to the states, I only knew how to speak the Hungarian language. My mother was in the process of teaching me Mandarin Chinese because that is the language my family speaks and she wanted me to be able to communicate with them properly. I was picking it up fairly quickly because it was normal to speak it around my family and while at home. When I had to start going to school, that is when things got a little more complicated. The school that I went to at that time was full of Chinese students, even the teachers were a majority of Chinese descent. I was too naive to believe that they would all speak the languages I had grown up speaking, when in reality the overwhelming dialect was actually Cantonese. On top of that, we were now living in the United States, which meant English had to be learned as well.
Learning two different dialects of Chinese was not hard. It was easy to pick up due to being immersed in the culture. Plus, there are overlapping variations of the two different Chinese dialects made it easy to learn one while speaking the other. Learning English was the hardest part though, seeing as the grammar of it and the structure of words and sentences was so different than what I had spoken until that point. Often times, I had to stay after school for additional one on one time with the teachers to get the basics down. What I remember struggling with them the most, was getting the alphabet down and understanding what it meant and how to pronounce it.
After a while, I got the process down. It was humorous to me how I was constantly switching between languages depending on who I was conversing with. I was speaking Hungarian and Mandarin Chinese at home with my mother. Then, I was speaking Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese with my sister. While at school, I was either speaking Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, or English. I was the weird kid who spoke in different languages, all the time. All the other kid thought different of me, and thought it odd that I had so many languages to speak as well as people to speak them to. As a kid, I thought it was a bad thing because I wanted to fit in. Looking back at it now, I find myself to be lucky to have learned all those different languages.
When I was around 6, I found out that I was diagnosed with hearing loss. That made me feel even more out of touch with everyone around me. Right as I’m beginning to grasp all of the languages I had been learning fully, I was faced with this setback. I did not fit in at all at this point. Due to the hearing loss, I had to wear a hearing aid that was small, but still noticeable. My hearing loss is mainly in the high decibel, meaning that it's harder for me to hear low frequency sound and higher pitch. For example, like a clock ticking, the letters s, x, and th, and people with a higher pitch voice.
Having to wear hearing aids was not something that I was proud of at the moment. There were always eyes staring at me and it made me feel insecure and weird. No one else had them except me. When we are young, especially when one is still new to a community, it never feels good to stand out negatively. My hearing aids made me feel different and sometimes I hated it. With my hearing loss, I felt that everyone around me, especially the school system, treated me with extra special care that I didn't want in the first place. It made me feel like a burden and a chore to my teachers, creating a guilt in myself.
When I was in the second grade, my parents went through a divorce. Since we were always split between countries, I actually had only been consistently seeing my father for about two years. I remember his temper, and how he drank quite often. I later found out from my mother that these were the reasons they had to split up. At the time however, I was still bewildered by the loss of my father in my life. I became a foreign child in a foreign world, with only one parent to fall back on for support and love. I felt as though my early life was full of inconsistency and disappointment.
Now a single mother, my mother had to provide for not only herself, but all three of us in this new world we called home. Starting on the Southside of Chicago made things difficult at first, but eventually we moved to safer areas with better opportunities. My mother, like other immigrants, found it difficult to get a nine to five job that would pay well with her little experience in this country. Being an innovator, she created her own small tourism business. She started as an independent worker, just showing people from home around Chicago when they would fly out here for a visit. Eventually, her business grew into what it is today, an intricate series of logistics and cultural exploration for a Chinese immigrant in these great United States of America. Watching her work and observing the passion with which she worked inspired me from an early age to be a hard worker and a problem solver. All of this stemmed from just trying to give her children a better life than she had, and that created a fire in me to be the very best I could be to make her proud.
Due to my mother’s work, and her idea of moving us out of the city and somewhere safer, we ended up in Darien when I was about twelve. It was a culture shock again for me, seeing as all I had known in America was the city life and what came with it. This small and quiet suburb felt different, but still like home to me. All aspects of my life improved upon our move to the suburbs. My grades increased from below average to above average across the board, and I had an easier time making friends and fitting in with groups of people my age, even though now the majority race was caucasian instead of asian, italian and hispanic. This is where I truly began to find myself and decide who I would become as I grew up into a man.
I did not know it at the time, but coming into high school with the support group of my mother and the close friends I had gained in my three years of junior high had a significant role in my high school success. While I found it easy to get along with a large number of people in junior high, high school became even easier. This is when I realized I had a talent for fitting in and reading the people I was with. The number of friends I had increased dramatically once I hit high school, and meeting all these different people doing different things inspired me once again. I was even given a nickname “Duo Tang Do Yo Thang”. I had struggled through my early years and assimilating to the culture, however now I was a master of it and had more trouble finding ways I was not fitting in. It felt good to become a part of a group finally, and feel like I had a home and a culture to call my own.
I was recognized as a leader at my high school. I was the vice president for our business club, DECA. Was voted the top business student of my class. My credibility was cemented from a tragedy that I had to face. My mother was forced to leave the country because of an expired visa. This is devastating because she had a house and established a travel business that has a large Asian clientele base. When she was forced to leave, my mother signed over power of attorney that allowed me to take care of everything in her name including the house and the business. So I was running a business and managing a house when I was seventeen despite having no background. Unfortunately, the house was foreclosed a few year later and the business shrank.
When I got to college, I made it a point for me to just dominate and to work on creating a brand while I was studying marketing. I quickly made a name for myself as I was voted into student council as a freshman. I was also in the American Marketing Association and was invited to go to the national conference at the end of the year. College was easy due to my experiences leading up to it, and how I handled them. College is a series of unforeseen circumstance and my life is one giant unforeseen circumstance even from the beginning. The hardest part was learning to hold myself responsible for any mistakes I made.
After my first year of college, one of my old managers called me to see how I was doing and asked if I wanted to be a branch manager so that I can open up my own office for the summer. It was something that I had wanted to do for a while so I pursued it. It was one of the most challenging experiences that I had dealt with up to that date. It was this experience that taught me to love working with people and to find joy in my colleague’s success. Despite the hardships and difficulties, I am better for it from what I have learned from this experience.
The phrase “Duo Tang Do Yo Thang” really stick out to me from high school to this day. Those words help inspire me to do the thing that I wanted to do in life, taking bold steps to fulfill my personal goal. That thought has helped keep me steady throughout the trials of my life. I feel the need to make sure that I get to pass it on to the next person and inspire them the way I was inspired. Instead of “Duo Tang Do Yo Thang”, I wanted it to be “Do Yo Thang” and have it reach out to other people, no matter who they are or what they are pursuing. This isn't just about me, this is about a movement for others to simply enjoy what they are doing and reaching out to gain confidence in doing what they really stand behind with all their passion. It is with this thought in mind that I use “Do Yo Thang” as a mantra for my life.
Being yourself is all that you can be and no one can take that away from you. I hope that my life experiences can teach others that the struggles and hardships are there as a test to see how bad you want it. I use the obstacles that I faced from before birth as motivation to continue pushing forward in an effort to become a better man. In life, we are given the test first and the lesson after. The only way to get better is to go through the tests and keep on learning. I believed that what I have gone through and what I have yet to gone through are what shaped me and what will make me the greatest person I can be.
