I love Maryam’s poem because it reflected the different perspective of immigrants and people in general. In response, I am writing about my own experience as an immigrant when I first came to America:
“Scentless flowers and tasteless food, even the air rots one’s teeth.”
That’s was exactly what I felt about America. There was no need to leave China especially when my entire family lived there. Long play dates with my cousins, small trinkets shops and lively arcades were all left behind. But that wasn’t the thing that bothered me the most. The one thing about America that drove me nuts was McDonald’s. The first meal served to me by my mother when we got off the airplane, was the number 2 combo with 2 cheeseburgers and fries. I remember glaring it the food and then sniffing it as if it had poison dowsed throughout the layers of meat and cheese. Where was the good homemade Chinese food? Warm noodles and rice with eggplant cooked with a special sauce…or fish soup and bokchoi? Why was I being forced to eat some thing so foreign and disgusting?
I pushed the tray to the far end of the table and refused to eat it. My mom looked at me with a frustrated face, but didn’t force me to consume the meal. She probably understood that moving halfway across the world wasn’t easy for me…at least she could do was to spare me poison.
Realizing this, my mom packed the food in a to-go bag and took my sister and me to the house owned by my grandma. There we settled down and began unpacking. After three hours of continuous cleaning and organization, I began to realize that my stomach was growling. Having skipped the meal before, I was now starving. I begged my mom to cook the delicious noodles that she was famous for making, but she just pushed me aside and told me to finish my food from before.
I grimaced and held out. I wanted to prove something to my mom by actively protesting the food. Maybe she would see that I was clearly going to die of starvation unless we moved back… But she was just too busy unpacking to realize that my stomach was doing flips and tumbles.
An hour later, I caved. I reached in my mom’s purse and pulled out the stale food. The fries weren’t crispy and the burgers were slightly soggy from the buns’ absorption of ketchup. I took my first bite reluctantly and automatically scrunched my face in disgust before I realized that I actually liked what I was eating. I keep the same face as I bit into it a second and then third time, until I finally was finished with the first burger. This was the process until I got down to the last fry, but because I didn’t want to be ashamed that I was wrong, I told my mom that McDonald’s was disgusting.
She probably realized that was a lie once we went back and I ordered the same thing again and again.
