The First Day of a New Life

a beginning and an end.

I still remember the first day when I arrived in the U.S.

I was eighteen and just graduated from high school. Excited, scared, nervous, and homesick. I was all of those things.

We all have moments and days in life that we don’t know how important they are until days, months, or years later. Although I had known the significance this day would hold long before the day had arrived, there was something else about it I didn’t know until almost a decade later.

Less than twenty hours after saying goodbye to my parents at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport, I landed in Richmond, Virginia, after a short layover in Chicago O’Hare. It was a mid-August afternoon, still warm and humid. Growing up in Southeast China, humidity and summer heat, although much gentler in Virginia, were the only things that reminded me of home.

After going through the customs, I got on a taxi to a hotel ten minutes away from the airport. The highway was surrounded by forests that didn’t seem to end. When I started to wonder how a hotel could exist in this seemingly middle of nowhere, the taxi driver exited the highway on the right and drove for another minute or so before a hotel appeared on the left side of the road.

As I stepped out of the taxi, I gasped at the parking lot that was much larger than the hotel building itself. The decor inside the hotel was more modest than what I expected a hotel to be for the price I paid, and everything seemed bigger than what I was used to: the bathtub, the sink, the bed, and even the pillows. A few years later, after I started traveling to different parts of the country, I then realized that the hotel I stayed at that day was typical, ordinary, and a good deal.

I walked out of the lobby after checking in to get some air. Across the road from the hotel was the same forest I saw while in the taxi. The trees were tall, lush, and so green that I could almost see water coming out of them. Besides the occasional cars that drove by, I didn’t see any pedestrians. After all, there was nothing to walk to. It was just a hotel by the highway. Everything felt so vast, calm, and quiet at that moment.

The sky was starting to turn orange. I looked at my watch, and it was almost 7 p.m. Jet-legged, disoriented, and exhausted, I had no sense of time or space and was still full from all the airplane food I had eaten.

I thought to myself that, by tomorrow morning, I’d have been picked up by Conor, a rising sophomore from Richmond who was assigned to be my mentor by the international student center at my university. We exchanged a few emails and Skype calls over the summer to get to know each other and made plans for my arrival. I felt comforted by his offer to drive the 45-minute journey to help me move into my residence hall, even though it’d be another week before he had to go back to campus. 45 minutes of driving seemed unimaginable to me then, and now I have had commutes that lasted more than one hour each way. I was touched by his kindness and generosity on my first day. And over the next few years, as I got to know Conor better, he became one of the kindest and most generous people I got to know.

By this time tomorrow, I’d already have moved into my residence hall and have met some of my hallmates. What would my new room look like? How am I going to make friends? What am I going to major in? What kind of person I am going to become? How do I navigate the world now that I am all alone? I felt overwhelmed by these questions then and for a long time after that. On that day and forward, I mostly looked ahead and rarely looked back.

I always knew that my first day in the U.S. was the beginning of something new, but only a decade later did I realize that day would also be the beginning of an end. From that day forward, I’d forever be leaving behind a part of who I was, and no one I met in the U.S. over the next 10 years, no matter how close we’d become, would ever fully get to know the part of me that I had left behind.

I raised my head and watched the sun gradually sink into the horizon, turning everything around to a warm golden color that felt comforting. After seeing a hazy sky for many years, I was overjoyed to see the sky so clearly at that moment. When it was almost dark, I walked back to the lobby and back to my room, looking forward to the next day.

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Thank you for your support, as always. Here are two of my most recent essays, in case you missed them.

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