David Anonymous

On my eighth birthday, my parents forcefully stripped me from my native China, forsaking the familiar, overcrowded landscape of towering skyscrapers and chaotic traffic in order to venture into a peculiar and alien territory known as Vancouver. There, the streets lay devoid of people. The skyscrapers I had once known were now transformed into a scattering of dwarf-like dwellings. The orderly array of traffic implausibly yielded to pedestrians.

But the most profound and devastating transformation concerned that mysterious gibberish that everyone spoke -- everyone, that is, but me. Forlorn in a bleak land with no knowledge of English, I felt like an infinitesimal particle, lost and dejected. Though my parents had made the enormous sacrifices necessary to emigrate for my sake, I still felt betrayed. I entered grade three with that sense of betrayal deeply ingrained, and only further augmented by the fact that I was no longer within the safe reach of my parents. At school I was truly alone. My despondency and my communication difficulties had disastrous consequences regarding my education. As my worried parents watched my grades plummet, they began to wonder whether the move might have been a horrible mistake. Their loss of...