When I went to the Airport Station in Hong Kong, and I took the flight to America, it is my first time leaving China. I was excited but a little bit scared to come to America.
I thought American schools would be very free, where the students and teachers would be very welcoming. Even though my English was not very good, I thought they would not laugh at me. I went to the Boston Education Center to choose the school. First, they talked about my English level. They said that my English was not very good, and they would send me to Charlestown High School. They said in Charlestown High School, there were many Asians especially Chinese, and they told me I could improve my English in Charlestown High School much more easily. Then I said I wanted to go Charlestown High School, because they said Charlestown High School was a very good school.
When I first went to Charlestown High School, I was very surprised, there were a lot of Chinese, I felt comfortable at that moment. Then the teacher told us some important rules about Charlestown High School. When I first met my classmates, I felt they were very nice, and the teacher was very friendly, they looked like very welcoming.
At that moment, I thought I could get a good grade and improve my English. But when I went to Charlestown High School for a few months, I felt hard to improve my English in Charlestown High School, because in the SEI class, all the classmates were Chinese, they always spoke Chinese in class, I thought there is no difference in class here than in Hong Kong, students speak Chinese in both places. The environment was so unhelpful for learning English. I could not waste my time anymore and I tried to join some programs to improve my English. I heard that the Chinese immigrant Student leadership program was recruiting people, so I went to the Chinese immigrant Student leadership program open house, and asked them whether I could join their program and they said “yes”. I was very happy.
The Chinese immigrant Student leadership program is a very good program, I learned a lot in this program. In the beginning, the teacher told us to make a video about our Chinese immigrant stories. After finishing the video, our teacher sent this video to the White House. After three months, our teacher told us we won the video competition and we could go to Washington DC, I was really excited about that.
After coming back from Washington DC, I tried to join more programs to improve my English, and my teacher introduced to me the Boston University Upward Bound Math Science program. I learned a lot in this program. The teachers there were very nice and I met some friendly ninth-grade students from other high schools. Some of my classmates from Charlestown High