Personal Experience: My Experience As An Immigrant

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Boba, boba, boba. Little shops around every corner on every block, creating chaotic streets and bright lights. Cars from all directions bombarding black pavements, honking constantly at one another. Never ending places to eat, all with unique names and foreign pronunciations largely owned by first generation immigrants. Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese. They’re filled with my ethnic background, full of history and familiarity. The crowded hectic noisy mess I love, this move reconnected me back to the culture I once remembered. Hello, Little Saigon.

As a first generation immigrant, I was born and raised in Vietnam. Due to a life threatening illness, my mother left everything behind and migrated to the United States wishing to discover some sort of treatment for me, from America’s fast growing and advancing medical care as she heard it was. With nothing in possession but me in her arms; working jobs from dusk till dawn, booking appointments with strange doctors from here and there, traveling far, spending hours waiting
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A special area protrude to me, overflowing with culturally diverse restaurants and shops consists of exuberant activities. Sophomore year in high school, choosing to study Vietnamese as my foreign language class requirement, I relearned all of my country’s history and traditions. I gained friends of my background with similar hobbies and enthusiasm for a common food. Participating in protests in front of the Asian Garden Mall shouting to reclaim Vietnam as a non communist country with my fellow immigrant classmates, it was then that I actualized. Little Saigon is such a vibrant community, enriched with diversity and culture. Prehistory of my ancestor, we as the first generation immigrants has brought, cultivated, shared and embraced all of this sacred component that created us to who we are, it made me who I