The Importance of Learning the English Language as an Immigrant

I remember it was Friday in the morning when my uncle David took my whole family to the local hospital to get a medical examination for the green card application. I and my parents have to get this examination as we was just landing on the United State from Vietnam a couple month ago. In order to obtain our green card, we had to do this medical examination first so that the government could check if we were carrying any danger decease that might affect on other people.

Uncle Davis has been very nice to my family when we first arrived to the United State. He helped my family to finish all the paper works and got me back to school. However, I think that he’s a very unpredictable guy and it’s hard to tell what really is in his mind. For me, I have always been afraid of him since I was little as he always yelled at me and my cousins if we did something wrong.

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In fact, I hate him sometime for his strict personality.

When we arrived at the local hospital on the Camino Ruiz Street in San Diego, my uncle took my family to the doctor room who he has made an appointment with through the phone a couple days ago. As we walked inside the room, I was amazed by how clean and friendly the room look. It was painted in white color and there were some green furniture that made the room look really neutral.

In addition, there was a really nice doctor assistant who was smiling at us and she asked us if we had an appointment with the doctor. My uncle said yes and she told us to have a seat and handed us three forms to fill out. My uncle took two of them since he had to fill them out for my parents as they don’t know English and he handed me the other form to fill it out by myself.

Unfortunately, there were some new vocabularies that I haven’t learned yet in the form. Therefore, I turned into my uncle and asked him to translate them. At first, he didn’t pay attention to me but when he finished filling out my parents forms, he turned on me and said “You should have learned those terms before you came here.” Then he continued, “Every time I see you on your laptop, all you do is playing some stupid online game. Do you have any idea why I bought you that laptop?” Everyone in the room started looking at us. My face turned red and I remained silence. I was extremely embarrassed by what he said. After a while, he took my form and started filling it out for me.

After turning all the forms to the assistant, we waited for a while and the doctor called us to come in. The process of medical examination was quick as we didn’t have any specific health problem. First, we did physical exam. Second, we took a blood test and urine test. Finally, the doctor took our chest x-ray.

On our way home, my uncle was driving his car and my dad sat on the passenger seat in the front beside him. Me and my mom sat on the back seat. He began to rag on how am I not knowing English eventhough I have gone to school for 4 months already. With an extremely deep raspy voice of every word coming out of his mouth, I can tell that he was really angry at me. At that moment, I just sat in the car and let him destroying my ears. He said “learning English is really important and I was so disappoint that you didn’t spend your value time to learn it. You’re so useless Louis.”

When I get home, I just get into my room and start to think back of what he said and wonder why did he look down on me like that. At that moment, I was really mad at him for embarrassing me in public like that. Moreover, I felt like he was absolutely wrong for doing that as I was only been in the State for a couple months so how am I suppose to learn English that quick. Therefore, I promise to myself that I will prove to him that all the things he said to me were actually wrong.

Then I started putting a lot of hard work in English. I started to talk to people at school more frequently to improve my social skill. Also, I learned how to read and write through my ESL class. With the laptop that he bought for me, I started to do some research and learned about marketing online. I started building some websites and promoted them to get more people come to my websites. One year later, I started making money with my websites through some of the online advertisers. Moreover, I have stopped playing online game and I only used my laptop for study purpose.

Through this experience, I realize that sometime in life we should look at people in different way and question why did they do this to us. Also, I think that he was right on everyone need a person to push them on to achieve what they want. Like the popular trainer from BeachBody who created a DVD set called Insanity, he actually pushed people to workout more by yelling at them so that they can get a better result. Finally, his idea was actually work so that thousands of people have had success with his DVD. Therefore, I feel blessed when I have an uncle like him to watch over me.