To live in the Borderlands means giving up your closest friends. While I never thought this would happen to me, I was wrong. When I was very young, growing up in Shanghai, China, I was close with a few friends. One of my best friends was a boy named David. We shared our experiences and talked a lot, which was one of the causes for our fervent friendship. However, this friendship was short-lived.
When I was six years old, my family and I moved to Cupertino, California so I could attend elementary school. My parents believed that exposing me to American culture early on would be beneficial, but I was young and didn’t think much of it. Though I missed many of my old friends in China, life moved on. During my time in America, I lost a lot of my ability
…show more content…
I was unable to maintain a close relationship with my old friends from China because of the time that I had invested in America’s culture, yet I still wanted to be able to talk to them. If I chose to spend all of my time on one side, whether it was my life in America or China, I would have to retain certain parts of the other. This realization drove me to think of a solution to the problem immediately. One possibility was relearning a lot of Chinese but making sure it wasn’t going to be my foremost priority. This way, I was able to keep my old friends as a part of my life and continue everything else normally. Even though they were kept at the margins of my memory, the friends I grew up with were still arguably a big part of my life, and I didn’t want to let go of it. However, I briefed myself about the realistic chances that I would even want to relearn one of the most complex languages in the world simply to converse with people I meet with only every few years and decided it wasn’t worth it. So I did what no one would expect: solving the problem by not solving it in the first place; or in this case, leaving a part of my life