Success, not just Survival
I’m what you would call a first generation college student. My mom is an immigrant from China; my dad is from Vietnam. My household–well I guess the household information that I put on my taxes–is five: my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister, and me. When I was younger my grandma and grandpa lived with us, as well as three other aunts. One aunt has moved out; my grandpa has passed away; my other aunt has suffered from a stroke and now is completely paralyzed and cannot speak. Speaking of the past and the present, everyone doesn’t always get along with each other but we’re a family and we make it work. My dad got Polio as a teenager and they couldn’t get him to the doctor in time, (I don’t know how good the healthcare system was in Vietnam so I’m not sure how much a doctor could have helped anyway)-- ever since he’s paralyzed from the waist down. He uses crutches and a wheelchair.
My dad’s side of the family came over to America with very little. My aunt was a great cook though, so she made Vietnamese desserts that they would sell on the streets. They eventually made enough to start a restaurant. My mom came over as a picture bride from China. Her dad was a government official. When he fell really ill from cancer, she was forced to cut her education short after middle school for work in order to help pay for the hospital bills. After his death, my grandma knew there wouldn’t be any opportunities in China for my mom and her sister, which was why the whole picture bride thing happened. My mom actually had a sort-of boyfriend at the time; they both liked each other a lot. He finally declared his love for her but told her he wanted to find a good job that could support both of them before he proposed to her. Unbeknownst to him, my mom had already sent her picture over to America, and my dad had already expressed his interest. They were forced to go their separate ways. Years and years later my mom and her friends from middle school had reconnected through this app called WeChat, that’s like the Chinese version of Facebook. She was also able to reconnect with the sister of her old love. It turned out that after she left, he had fallen into depression and started drinking a lot, because he couldn’t get over his love for her. He died in a motorcycle accident. Take that story and make it a into a movie, I know. I cried when she told me this story, because it made me realize how much heartbreak and hard work had gone into giving me what I had.
I know my mom really wants to go back to China to see her middle school friends again, and also to visit his grave, visit his family, offer some closure, get some closure for herself. In Chinese culture though, there’s a lot of emphasis on giving face, the equivalent of showing respect and dignity. Even if we could afford the plane ticket (we can’t), we would still need to come up with money to buy meaningful gifts for these friends.
It’s not just my mom either. My dad’s family left behind a lot of people in Vietnam because the capital Saigon had fallen. It was actually my grandma who had urged my family to flee; she didn’t think it was going to end well. They were on a boat for several weeks; it was super-cramped, there was no space to move. They had ran out of food and water at some point; conditions were all around terrible. But they made it to the Philippines and then once they were cleared the American government actually bought tickets for them to go over to America, of course they later down the line had to pay back the government for the tickets.
The way it’s been in my family, we receive a lot of welfare from the government. My mom is employed by the In-Home Support Service, so she does in-home support for my dad. It was fine for a while, but recently they’ve started cutting her pay and cutting her hours. We got a new social service worker and she’s been really strict about hours and pay and what qualifies for billing. We’re on food stamps, but I think I’ve been on food stamps all my life. I just didn’t realize that other people weren’t the same until I was older. We go to the cheap Asian markets and the cheap Hispanic markets and my family makes good food and it’s fine. Growing up, my mom always prioritized education. I remember when I was in first grade my parents made me memorize multiplication tables. I hated it at the time but later realized it was actually super helpful.
My mom knows Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka (which is the dialect of the region where she is from). My dad speaks Vietnamese and Cantonese. Over time they picked up each other’s languages. We spoke Vietnamese and Cantonese in my house, but I only picked up Cantonese. I’m not that fluent anymore because preschool happened; I had to learn English and then I just spent a lot of time with English. One of the things that makes me really happy here is that I’m taking Mandarin right now and it’s helped a lot with my Cantonese. It’s been really cool to talk to my dad in Canto, because his English isn’t that great and there’s been a communication barrier for such a long time. A lot of my family can’t speak English at all. With my sad, broken Canto, it’s always been hard communicating with grandparents, aunts and uncles. I only wish I had recovered so much of my fluency sooner, before my grandparents could no longer speak with me. I’m debating on whether or not I should take Vietnamese later on. The question is: Should I double major and make myself more marketable when I get out of college need to look for a job? Or should I just follow my heart and learn Vietnamese and maybe even Spanish because the area where I grew up has a large Hispanic population; Spanish is cool.
I’m considering the Computing and the Arts major; I guess my biggest struggle at this point is that many of Yale’s art classes have high fees. Like the intro class Principles of Animation; that’s a hundred and fifty dollars. And there’s a bunch of classes that are that expensive. My family can’t pay that. I mean, they possibly could, but I don’t want to make them do that. I’d rather they spent it on themselves and not struggle. I did get a job; I’m a media tech, and I do enjoy the job, but I don’t want to commit so many hours to the job that I’m struggling to stay afloat with my schoolwork, missing out on other opportunities. A problem for me last semester, my first semester freshmen year, was that I had over-committed to extracurricular activities and I ended up failing my math class. I just don’t want a similar thing to happen again, where I end up needing to work to fulfill a student income contribution. I want to be spending more time succeeding rather than surviving. I’ve had conversations with my parents about my choice of major, especially my mom. At first she wanted me to be a doctor, or be an engineer, go to grad school, get a stable job, but now she tells me follow my heart. That she’s giving me this freedom makes me so, so happy. I think she’s good as long as I don’t become a music major or an art major haha.
When I was applying to colleges my mom had wanted me to apply to these really elite schools, and I ended up deciding between UC Berkeley and Yale. I liked the vibe at Berkeley; there were a lot of low-income first gen students like me. At that point it was between following my heart and following my brain; my heart was saying Berkeley and my brain was saying Yale, and part of the reason it was saying Yale was because my family has done so much to get me to where I am; I felt like I had to pay them back by getting into what you would consider the highest school possible. I ended up here, maybe I would’ve been happier at Berkeley. I don’t mind my situation here; I’ve found some great people. I do think that I would like to, in the future, make decisions based on what I want rather than what I think my family wants of me.
I want to say, I know a bunch of my FSY [Freshman Scholars at Yale] friends, some of them have told me their stories, and I know some of them have had a lot more struggles. Some of them don’t have a stable home to live in, some of them were a few dollars over the food stamp salary cutoff so they have struggled to get food. The school I went to obviously wasn’t an elite private school, but it wasn’t a bad school either. There was an AP/honors program, which I know a bunch of my friends didn’t have.
As far as financial aid goes, my school had a cash-for college workshop session; people who were trained for FAFSA came in and answered any questions that we had, kind of walked you through it, which I know was really helpful. It did seem like it could have been easier, maybe if they could consolidate FAFSA and CSS. It is upsetting that they make you pay to send your CSS profile to colleges–you’re asking for financial aid but they require you to submit a fee. Questbridge also took off a lot of the stress with applying to college since it helped to minimize costs.
I just want to do my family right. I want to major in a field I enjoy and go to grad school. I want to make enough to give them that trip back to their homelands. I want to give them happiness because they’ve given me everything they possibly could so that I could be as happy and successful as possible.
My dad’s side of the family came over to America with very little. My aunt was a great cook though, so she made Vietnamese desserts that they would sell on the streets. They eventually made enough to start a restaurant. My mom came over as a picture bride from China. Her dad was a government official. When he fell really ill from cancer, she was forced to cut her education short after middle school for work in order to help pay for the hospital bills. After his death, my grandma knew there wouldn’t be any opportunities in China for my mom and her sister, which was why the whole picture bride thing happened. My mom actually had a sort-of boyfriend at the time; they both liked each other a lot. He finally declared his love for her but told her he wanted to find a good job that could support both of them before he proposed to her. Unbeknownst to him, my mom had already sent her picture over to America, and my dad had already expressed his interest. They were forced to go their separate ways. Years and years later my mom and her friends from middle school had reconnected through this app called WeChat, that’s like the Chinese version of Facebook. She was also able to reconnect with the sister of her old love. It turned out that after she left, he had fallen into depression and started drinking a lot, because he couldn’t get over his love for her. He died in a motorcycle accident. Take that story and make it a into a movie, I know. I cried when she told me this story, because it made me realize how much heartbreak and hard work had gone into giving me what I had.
I know my mom really wants to go back to China to see her middle school friends again, and also to visit his grave, visit his family, offer some closure, get some closure for herself. In Chinese culture though, there’s a lot of emphasis on giving face, the equivalent of showing respect and dignity. Even if we could afford the plane ticket (we can’t), we would still need to come up with money to buy meaningful gifts for these friends.
It’s not just my mom either. My dad’s family left behind a lot of people in Vietnam because the capital Saigon had fallen. It was actually my grandma who had urged my family to flee; she didn’t think it was going to end well. They were on a boat for several weeks; it was super-cramped, there was no space to move. They had ran out of food and water at some point; conditions were all around terrible. But they made it to the Philippines and then once they were cleared the American government actually bought tickets for them to go over to America, of course they later down the line had to pay back the government for the tickets.
The way it’s been in my family, we receive a lot of welfare from the government. My mom is employed by the In-Home Support Service, so she does in-home support for my dad. It was fine for a while, but recently they’ve started cutting her pay and cutting her hours. We got a new social service worker and she’s been really strict about hours and pay and what qualifies for billing. We’re on food stamps, but I think I’ve been on food stamps all my life. I just didn’t realize that other people weren’t the same until I was older. We go to the cheap Asian markets and the cheap Hispanic markets and my family makes good food and it’s fine. Growing up, my mom always prioritized education. I remember when I was in first grade my parents made me memorize multiplication tables. I hated it at the time but later realized it was actually super helpful.
My mom knows Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka (which is the dialect of the region where she is from). My dad speaks Vietnamese and Cantonese. Over time they picked up each other’s languages. We spoke Vietnamese and Cantonese in my house, but I only picked up Cantonese. I’m not that fluent anymore because preschool happened; I had to learn English and then I just spent a lot of time with English. One of the things that makes me really happy here is that I’m taking Mandarin right now and it’s helped a lot with my Cantonese. It’s been really cool to talk to my dad in Canto, because his English isn’t that great and there’s been a communication barrier for such a long time. A lot of my family can’t speak English at all. With my sad, broken Canto, it’s always been hard communicating with grandparents, aunts and uncles. I only wish I had recovered so much of my fluency sooner, before my grandparents could no longer speak with me. I’m debating on whether or not I should take Vietnamese later on. The question is: Should I double major and make myself more marketable when I get out of college need to look for a job? Or should I just follow my heart and learn Vietnamese and maybe even Spanish because the area where I grew up has a large Hispanic population; Spanish is cool.
I’m considering the Computing and the Arts major; I guess my biggest struggle at this point is that many of Yale’s art classes have high fees. Like the intro class Principles of Animation; that’s a hundred and fifty dollars. And there’s a bunch of classes that are that expensive. My family can’t pay that. I mean, they possibly could, but I don’t want to make them do that. I’d rather they spent it on themselves and not struggle. I did get a job; I’m a media tech, and I do enjoy the job, but I don’t want to commit so many hours to the job that I’m struggling to stay afloat with my schoolwork, missing out on other opportunities. A problem for me last semester, my first semester freshmen year, was that I had over-committed to extracurricular activities and I ended up failing my math class. I just don’t want a similar thing to happen again, where I end up needing to work to fulfill a student income contribution. I want to be spending more time succeeding rather than surviving. I’ve had conversations with my parents about my choice of major, especially my mom. At first she wanted me to be a doctor, or be an engineer, go to grad school, get a stable job, but now she tells me follow my heart. That she’s giving me this freedom makes me so, so happy. I think she’s good as long as I don’t become a music major or an art major haha.
When I was applying to colleges my mom had wanted me to apply to these really elite schools, and I ended up deciding between UC Berkeley and Yale. I liked the vibe at Berkeley; there were a lot of low-income first gen students like me. At that point it was between following my heart and following my brain; my heart was saying Berkeley and my brain was saying Yale, and part of the reason it was saying Yale was because my family has done so much to get me to where I am; I felt like I had to pay them back by getting into what you would consider the highest school possible. I ended up here, maybe I would’ve been happier at Berkeley. I don’t mind my situation here; I’ve found some great people. I do think that I would like to, in the future, make decisions based on what I want rather than what I think my family wants of me.
I want to say, I know a bunch of my FSY [Freshman Scholars at Yale] friends, some of them have told me their stories, and I know some of them have had a lot more struggles. Some of them don’t have a stable home to live in, some of them were a few dollars over the food stamp salary cutoff so they have struggled to get food. The school I went to obviously wasn’t an elite private school, but it wasn’t a bad school either. There was an AP/honors program, which I know a bunch of my friends didn’t have.
As far as financial aid goes, my school had a cash-for college workshop session; people who were trained for FAFSA came in and answered any questions that we had, kind of walked you through it, which I know was really helpful. It did seem like it could have been easier, maybe if they could consolidate FAFSA and CSS. It is upsetting that they make you pay to send your CSS profile to colleges–you’re asking for financial aid but they require you to submit a fee. Questbridge also took off a lot of the stress with applying to college since it helped to minimize costs.
I just want to do my family right. I want to major in a field I enjoy and go to grad school. I want to make enough to give them that trip back to their homelands. I want to give them happiness because they’ve given me everything they possibly could so that I could be as happy and successful as possible.
