Class composite map

This is the house in Newton, Massachusetts, where I lived from birth until I went to college. When my parents bought this house in the late 1970s, Newton was a middle class suburb of Boston. In recent years, property values have skyrocketed making it a more affluent suburb. The house was a good size for our family because both my brother and I got our own bedrooms, and my parents added on a family room in the early 1980s where we spent most of our leisure/TV watching time. We owned the house and it was affordable as both my parents worked good white collar jobs (finance and public relations), and Newton was not as expensive then as it is now. My family moved there because:

1. my mother lived there in her late teenage years and her parents still lived in the area
2. it was on the Boston subway and close to major highways
3. there was a large Jewish population
4. the public schools are some of the best in the country

I moved out when I went to college at age 18, but my mother still lives in the house today. She's very proud of the color of those blue shutters. I painted that fence one summer.

This is the area of Tufts University, where I attended for my undergraduate degree. I lived in dorms or off-campus housing in the area during my four years.

This was my first apartment in Seattle. I moved there in 2006 to attend the University of Washington and earn a master's degree in musicology. We had killer views and it was surprisingly inexpensive.

This was the second apartment we had when we lived in Seattle. We moved because we wanted to get a dog and our previous landlord did not allow pets and was planning to raise our rent. 

This is the first apartment we lived in in NYC, we rented.

This was an apartment in a co-op building that we purchased in 2010.

This is our current apartment, which we rent from my wife's employer. It is across the street from her workplace, and very close to the train station which takes us into NYC in under an hour.

This is where I grew up in before I moved to the United States, it was a three bedroom, newly built apartment on the outskirt of our small coastal town. Some of my relatives lived across from the apartment and we had ample room space to accommodate everyone, which is the reason why I got a room belonging only to myself - a leisure I did not have after coming to the US. Since it was a small town and I had been an active child, biking was my way of commuting anywhere. I lived here for all 13 years of my life in China. 

This is the first place I lived in when my whole family immigrated here to the United States. It was a fairly large house located in Elmhurst, Queens with a lot of rooms and a lot of people. My uncle's families lived on the second floor and my family lived in the small attic. Since it was a relative's housing, we paid very little rent compare to others in the neighborhood, but it was not really comfortable for a household with a growing teenage (me), which is why I stayed out most of the time. Though it did get better throughout the years, I was eventually able to move downstairs, sharing a bunk bed with my cousin. Nevertheless, my parents wanted to provide a better living condition for us, so we moved after around two years. 

Because my parents enjoyed the relative convenience of living in a Chinese neighborhood, they choose to move from my uncle's house to a 14 story apartment only five minutes away. It was closer to the train and the bustling intersections, so naturally, the rent increased almost twofold. We could've used one more bedroom, but it was about as the best apartment as we can afford at the time. It's right across from a fire station, and that comes with waking up in the middle of every night by loud sirens, eventually, we were all used to it and we lived there for another two years until we moved to our current residence.