From a young age, I didn’t seem to be a very corporate academic learner for the first 2 to 4 years when returning from China to America. Although I was born in America, my parents sent me back to China when I was just a few months old because they didn’t have enough time to take care of me while working. So, I grew up accompanied mostly by my grandmother and auntie. Consequently, I had mistaken my aunt and uncle for my biological parents. But when I reached 4 years old, realities came slapping my face and shattering the illusion I had with my parents. My aunt announced that I must leave them, and needed to be sent back to America with my real parents. The news came as if lightning struck me, feeling lost and empty, and I seem to be unable to accept a strong feeling of rejection. How all these feelings turned into negative feelings planted in my heart.

Those negative feelings seemed to bloom when I arrived in America when I couldn’t accept my biological parents when I first met them at the airport. It took about a few weeks or a month to accept their identity and adjust my relationship and attitude toward them.

About a few months later, my mother sent me to a pre-k that marked the beginning of my journey as an academic learner. Although I overcame negative feelings with my parents, that doesn’t include the environment. Since I would still daydream of returning to China with my grandma, which made me not care much about America, reality slapped my face denying my daydream. Overall, the reality of being unable to return results in the growth of negative feelings and rejection toward learning. I started to behave more actively in fooling around in class and became more inactive when the teachers were teaching. I view the education from the teacher as gibberish, so the information usually enters from one ear and leaves in another. 

However, all of those actions and attitudes start to change when I enter first grade, especially when I receive my report card for the first marking period. During that time my grades weren’t that good, where I only have grades of ones and twos. Also, my mother had more time to spend with me resulting in me being more concerned and strict about my grade and performance since then. Every time she picked me up since first grade, she would ask my teachers about my performance at school. If any time I didn’t perform well or had an unpleasant grade, my mother and I would have a repeated lecture on performance and the learning attitude I need. The repeated lectures made me somewhat scared and annoyed, and somewhat motivating but more of forcing me to perform better. But, it seems to only influence my attitude while little improvement to my grade.

My attitude changed when I started to understand the burden my mother had faced when I saw her requesting people to help my learning and the money needed to spend on cram school. In addition, the discussion my mother had with me about how tribble our family financially when being first-generation immigrants. After that discussion, I started to wake up from the naive thoughts I had for myself and my family and accept the realities of our status. I also started developing long-term conscious self-awareness. As a result, this also became my life turning point in changing me to a more focused and serious attitude toward learning and achieving improvement with grades. From time to time I had a goal of achieving a high score, but the self-awareness made me realize the limits I pose and encourage myself that I should just try my best and accept the result.