Note: now that I’m not at grant anymore, it makes it easier to post this to a place where all my classmates can read it too.
When I first came to Portland, OR, it was hard. I was moving away from a place I had lived for 8 years, where I was practically a spolied brat. I had lived in bliss, Nepal was a great place to be at the time. Now it’s a little fishy with the civil war, but then it was awsome. I was going to a private british school, with saturday japanese school. I had 3 maids, 1 driver, and a cook, and we had a guard man around our house.
That’s an experience I don’t know how to describe. Now that i look back, I think of them as family. But when I was a kid, I really didn’t know much. I was sheltered from like everything. So all I knew was I could generally ask them to do anything for me, and if it was something they needed an okay on, the would call my mom. My friends families were also the same.
At the same time, I was also very exposed to the Nepalese culture. I participated in all the ceremonies with my “dede’s” (nepalese for sister, pronounced deedee’s). Right now I remember some of them crystal clear, but I suck at explaining them.
So, anyways, there are so many more things I want to talk about Nepal, but I’ll save that for another time. My dad went to work in India when i was 7, and my mom wanted to move back to America. And that’s what happened. Sometime’s I still wonder if that was the best thing to do, or the worst (not that I can go back and change it, and not that i want to).
I remember my biggest worry was staying alone at home at night. My perception of America was this horrible country with murderers around the corner. I know, Portland’s pretty safe compared to other large cities, but I was still scared. When school first started everyone liked me. But… I know now that dies off quickly here, and I was labled as “gay” because I was so different from them.
I guess it was a culture shock for me, none of my friends in Nepal were as brutal as the kids here. Bullying started so quickly, and it lasted so long. I only had 3 friends up until 7th grade; Charlie, Hiroshi, and Shaun. In 5th grade, I left for a year to Malaysia, where I improved on my Japanese fluency, and made some good friends there.
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