Constant Moving with a Big Family

 

Sharon Yuxin Tao

Instructor Adrienne Oliver

ENGL 1A

23 October 2020

Constant Moving with a Big Family 

It was 20 years ago when Daneal was 6 yrs old. The heavy snowing covered Paterson city, as it covered the future path to this new immigrant family to the United States. Stranded in snow, little Daneal felt curious but yet afraid. His mother took Daneal and his 2nd oldest sister to move there and left behind his dad, his older brother and sister, and Daneal’s pet dog Max as well. Later on, his older brother and oldest sister would come over but that was many years after. “The first apartment we lived in has three floors, and my mom divided them for different families. The first floor was me and my mom, the second floor lived my cousin and his relatives, the third floor is my aunt from China,” said Daneal. He has a good memory of this period of chaos time. I asked him if his dad came later to take care of the family, he shook his head and didn’t respond for a while. Few blocks away from their first home in the US, Daneal went to a Christian Baptism Academy School. He didn’t stay there for longer and then was transferred to a secular middle school several years later. 

“I missed my life in Jamaica before I came there,” Daneal told me with a gentle look on his face. It was a Thursday afternoon while I was interviewing Daneal and he was working on his artwork in the lab by himself. “ Though I was only 6 years old, I can remember times in my hometown more than ever.” He said and he showed me several pieces of drawings about his childhood. Daneal got a powerful and decisive mother who want to move to somewhere to start a new life with less stress and to somewhere she and her children can achieve their goals and stay safe and happy. The culture of Jamaican is not being so foreign and a good portion of Daneal’s extended family lived there made the reason that Daneal’s mother chooses the United States. Compared to the minorities in Jamaica where there are East Indians, Chinese, Middle Eastern, etc. The diversity of American society left a primary and profound expression to Daneal until now. Used to wander around the town in Jamaica, the strict and regulated society of American turned him into a more disciplined person. From the bottom of his heart, Daneal feels “my general upbringing in America was pretty great.”

As almost every immigrant family does encounter enormous difficulties, Daneal’s family had been through a tough first period of years. “My mom had a fashion design degree in Jamaica but it means nothing much in America.” said him, “so she has to be a nanny for a job to raise us.” Taking care of others’ babies was a laborious and laborsome job. As more and more siblings and cousins came to the United States and live with them, this big family had to move every year. They left the third apartment due to the ceaseless rot problem, and Daneal didn’t have his private room in their fourth apartment, etc. The dark and gloomy basement was full of Daneal’s childhood with his brother. In school, little Daneal found he was treated as a minority by his classmates. “Trying to speak American English made my speech very jumbled so I had to take speech therapy classes.” later recalled him. Growing up in Jamaica as a kid, he was familiar with Jamaican patois. Talking to classmates in proper English is an effortful endeavor. As a non-American born minority, I would relate to Daneal in terms of the difficulty of speech. Most of the time, Daneal was surrounded by students and people of diverse backgrounds and most of the people he met starting up in America were immigrants. He told me he never experienced racial or ethnic discrimination from the “expected” group of people, nevertheless, he occasionally felt unwelcomed by other minorities and immigrants as African American.