Born in Myanmar
Age: 18
October 18, 2021
I was born in the city but I moved to the village when I was two or three years old. I mostly grew up with my grandma in the village. I had a pretty happy childhood because all I remember is playing with friends and having fun.
We left because of my mom. She had to go to another country because it was very difficult for her to get a job in the village and in my country in general. She had a hard time finding work because she didn't go to college. She went to elementary school and that's it. She also has a lot of siblings and she had to help her mom. If you don't have an education it's really hard for people to get a good job in my country, it's really super hard.
So she left for Malaysia. After a few years of living in Malaysia, she called me and my sister to come with her, basically. That's why we left the country and moved. My grandma stayed in Myanmar with my mom's sisters and my cousins.
I was eight when we left. I was very excited because I hadn’t seen my mom for a really long time. She left when I was three or four, so I was very excited to meet my mom and be with her. We lived there for five years.
We were living illegally there, which is why we decided to leave. We didn't have any passports or legal documents. It was hard for us to live in Malaysia because we weren't citizens and we couldn't really go back to our country because we didn't have a house. Even if we went it would have been very difficult for us to live. That's why we decided to go to the United States.
It was actually hard to get to the US. We came with the UN. I don't really know much about that organization, but it was a hard process because we had to do a lot of tasks. We had to go to a lot of interviews. My parents had to learn English. We had to take lessons about how to live in the United States. We had to wait a couple years to come to the United States through the refugee resettlement program, so some of the years we were in Malaysia we were waiting.
When we found out we were able to come we were very happy, all of us, all of my whole family. We were very happy to come here because we knew that there were a lot of opportunities ahead of us in the US. We were so thrilled and excited.
I was 12 or 13 when we left Malaysia for the US. The journey was pretty easy because we came on airplanes. There weren’t any problems at all. It was me, my sister, my mom, and my dad. We knew that we were coming to Texas. The UN asked where we wanted to go, and my mom told them that she wanted to go to Austin, Texas because her friend was living here.
When we first got here it was pretty lonely. We lived in this apartment. It was pretty. There was a pool and it was big. But I remember I couldn't sleep because in Malaysia the time was very different. In the middle of the night I would look out the window, and I wouldn’t see any people, no one. I asked myself, is this the United States? Why is there no one? We didn't go anywhere for months because we didn’t have anything and we didn’t know how to get to places. It was pretty boring at the beginning, but my mom's friend would come to our house and talk. Sometimes she would take us to some places.
I started school two months after living in the United States, I believe. I started in seventh grade. That was pretty difficult at first because I understood English, but I didn't know how to speak English. It was difficult for me to make friends and talk to people. I had to learn a lot of new words. At times I felt lonely. I really missed the food, everything about the food. Everything that my grandma makes.
I've moved to a lot of places, right? I lived in a village and left when I was like 8 and I moved to Malaysia. I don't think I miss my friends, but I do miss my grandma and my cousins. I want to go and visit them sometime in the future.
It was hard for me to adapt to the language and the culture because everything was different. The way people talk, the school was different. It’s a big country. We had to learn how to fit into American culture. We had to learn how to ride buses because we didn't have a car at first. It was hard. Religion wise it wasn’t hard because we are Buddhist, so we can pray at home. We don’t have to go to temple.
There’s a lot of things about US culture that I’m excited about. The first thing would be the opportunities. There are a lot of opportunities, you can do a lot of things, which I don't think I could have done if I was in my country. Education is mostly free, which is super good. The freedom to do whatever you like. You can practice whatever religion you want. There is freedom in opportunities.
I definitely feel in-between cultures a lot. My mom always tells me - don't ever forget your culture, you’re not American. But sometimes it's hard for me to switch from one to the other.
In America people just kind of go with the flow. Young people, It's not like they don't respect adults, but they talk informally. I learned that because of school. Sometimes I like American culture more just because I have more freedom to do whatever I want.
There are certain things I don't believe in from my own culture. When my mom says that I have to be educated, that I have to go to college, that's how I’m going to get a good job. She always says that - that’s our culture, if I don't go to college I’m not going to be successful. I don’t believe that. I feel like in America, a lot of young people don't think that way. There's a lot of opportunities that you can do and you can be successful. The way my family thinks and the way that young people think is different.
I’m going to UT Austin right now, I just started my first semester as a full-time student. I don't like it. I do, actually, but I've just been wanting to go somewhere that was not Austin. Somewhere I've never lived. I don't feel like I'm in college. I don't know. I just feel like this is normal, almost like I'm in high school still. I’m studying environmental science, but I'm thinking of switching my major. To be honest I don't really know what I want to do. That’s the main problem. I'm in college, because, I don't know? That's what I'm supposed to do after high school. I just feel lost sometimes because I don't know what I'm doing.
I feel lost with everything. I don’t know what I should do with my life. I don't even know what I want to be. Some of my friends know where they want to be, what they want to study, what they don't like. But I don't know what major I should choose. I haven’t really met many people because most of my classes are online. I've been just hanging out with friends that I know from high school. I thought college would be way fun and interesting but it’s not so far.
If I could do anything I would travel. I would travel to Asian countries first. I would love to go to my country and I would like to travel to Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. I think I could go to Myanmar with a green card because we do have green cards, but it's better to have citizenship before going back just for safety, in case something happens. I haven’t applied for citizenship yet but my sister did. I went to Hawaii this summer, it was fun. It was like the best moment ever. I loved it. I was there for a week.
Just in case there are people like me who read this:
No one expected to live here, right? At first, it'll be challenging. Like my parents, they had a lot of hardship and it was difficult at the beginning for them because they didn’t know any English and even now they still don't know English, but they sacrificed for us. It's okay to have some difficult situations, but you can go through them. You can overcome it.