Possible chronic pain
Major changes in a person’s life may provide fascinating experiences. In particular, a life change to a foreign land generates experiences that are not only fascinating but also fascinatingly painful. One needs to have extremely high tolerance to pain in order to survive from drowning in the flood of pains, caused by loss of dignity one brings with him thousands miles away from his home land, loss of intelligence saved carefully for years and loss of confidence, in the years of transition to the unfamiliar foreign life.
Some embarrassing moments in one’s life may later turn out to be fun to talk about, something one may occasionally calls upon and chews on when bored. However, a single embarrassing moment, if of the right type, takes away one’s dignity. This, when recalled, gives chills on one’s upper back. Living in a foreign country provides opportunities for moments of such type because it sometimes shocks one with its unfamiliarity and uncertainty. One of my embarrassing moments of this type took the innermost layer of dignity off my skin. I once went swimming with a few people I had just been acquainted with shortly after I arrived at Vancouver from China. I was uptight, fighting to comprehend my new English-speaking friends. I felt nervous and lost in the locker room. I spent fifteen minutes to work the locker, a quarter of a minute to go through the shower, and then rushed to catch up with my acquaintances. Timidly, I marched toward the pool with others, my mind preoccupied with a sentence I was rehearsing for the on-going conversation. I saw a life-guard running toward me with enlarged eyes. His mouth moved rapidly, but his voice was low. He looked quite serious. I turned my left ear close to him, trying to understand what he was trying to tell me. He then added gesture. His right index finger was pointing down at me. My eyes and hundreds of others’ looked in the direction he was pointing at, and I saw that I was naked. I had not put on my swimming suit. At once I felt the world froze, and I was isolated in dead silence with a thunder of laughter. I ran back to the locker room.
My mother commented on this embarrassment in her letter that I had lost the “dignity I had brought all the way from home”. Shortly after, I moved to Edmonton, hoping I would not lose anything else crucial to my still young life.
Believe it or not, one can lose intelligence for reasons other than medical ones. Living a foreign life is one of them. I have lost some of mine, my verbal ability, for instance. I had carefully worked on it for two decades and succeeded in being articulate. However, not long after I moved to Canada I realized that I became really slow and dumb. I found myself sitting red-faced, sometimes pale, quietly and awkwardly during conversations or any group discussions, unresponsive to most ideas. To think that I am dumb and slow terrifies me, and so I have decided that this is nothing congenital, but a phobia to speech. Looking back on my five years of foreign life experiences, I have tracked down the root of the phobia. It rooted from a phone conversation between me and a female officer from Canada Immigration. I was asked to bring in some extra documents for my permanent residence application. I asked if I could fax her. Back then I had difficulty differentiating between the sound “a” and “uh”. After I ran that sentence for the third time, she hung up, and my application was rejected for insufficient proof of identification.
Not only have I become dumb, I have also become illiterate. When I read a piece of poem I had been forced to write in front of an English class, I was suddenly scared by the thought that I had the IQ of a Canadian boy in early teen age. The poem went like this:
Her love to me is as deep as the ocean sea,
Knowing this, I serve her a nice cup of tea.
After one loses his dignity and intelligence, there is little left for confidence. I had enjoyed the benefits of being confident for many years. Not any more. I have lost it. In school, I always try to keep my head low. At work, I am always too humble. In social life, I have only exchanged eye contacts with approximately five people of the opposite sex in five years. Consequently, I have spent so many lonely and boring evenings that could have been nice.
Living a foreign life is an ambivalent experience. It is wonderfully painful. It is a difficult and long fight to stop the painful part of this new life. One has to be strong, both physically and mentally to prevent the pains so caused from becoming a chronic condition and from collapsing during the suffering of them.
Major changes in a person’s life may provide fascinating experiences. In particular, a life change to a foreign land generates experiences that are not only fascinating but also fascinatingly painful. One needs to have extremely high tolerance to pain in order to survive from drowning in the flood of pains, caused by loss of dignity one brings with him thousands miles away from his home land, loss of intelligence saved carefully for years and loss of confidence, in the years of transition to the unfamiliar foreign life.
Some embarrassing moments in one’s life may later turn out to be fun to talk about, something one may occasionally calls upon and chews on when bored. However, a single embarrassing moment, if of the right type, takes away one’s dignity. This, when recalled, gives chills on one’s upper back. Living in a foreign country provides opportunities for moments of such type because it sometimes shocks one with its unfamiliarity and uncertainty. One of my embarrassing moments of this type took the innermost layer of dignity off my skin. I once went swimming with a few people I had just been acquainted with shortly after I arrived at Vancouver from China. I was uptight, fighting to comprehend my new English-speaking friends. I felt nervous and lost in the locker room. I spent fifteen minutes to work the locker, a quarter of a minute to go through the shower, and then rushed to catch up with my acquaintances. Timidly, I marched toward the pool with others, my mind preoccupied with a sentence I was rehearsing for the on-going conversation. I saw a life-guard running toward me with enlarged eyes. His mouth moved rapidly, but his voice was low. He looked quite serious. I turned my left ear close to him, trying to understand what he was trying to tell me. He then added gesture. His right index finger was pointing down at me. My eyes and hundreds of others’ looked in the direction he was pointing at, and I saw that I was naked. I had not put on my swimming suit. At once I felt the world froze, and I was isolated in dead silence with a thunder of laughter. I ran back to the locker room.
My mother commented on this embarrassment in her letter that I had lost the “dignity I had brought all the way from home”. Shortly after, I moved to Edmonton, hoping I would not lose anything else crucial to my still young life.
Believe it or not, one can lose intelligence for reasons other than medical ones. Living a foreign life is one of them. I have lost some of mine, my verbal ability, for instance. I had carefully worked on it for two decades and succeeded in being articulate. However, not long after I moved to Canada I realized that I became really slow and dumb. I found myself sitting red-faced, sometimes pale, quietly and awkwardly during conversations or any group discussions, unresponsive to most ideas. To think that I am dumb and slow terrifies me, and so I have decided that this is nothing congenital, but a phobia to speech. Looking back on my five years of foreign life experiences, I have tracked down the root of the phobia. It rooted from a phone conversation between me and a female officer from Canada Immigration. I was asked to bring in some extra documents for my permanent residence application. I asked if I could fax her. Back then I had difficulty differentiating between the sound “a” and “uh”. After I ran that sentence for the third time, she hung up, and my application was rejected for insufficient proof of identification.
Not only have I become dumb, I have also become illiterate. When I read a piece of poem I had been forced to write in front of an English class, I was suddenly scared by the thought that I had the IQ of a Canadian boy in early teen age. The poem went like this:
Her love to me is as deep as the ocean sea,
Knowing this, I serve her a nice cup of tea.
After one loses his dignity and intelligence, there is little left for confidence. I had enjoyed the benefits of being confident for many years. Not any more. I have lost it. In school, I always try to keep my head low. At work, I am always too humble. In social life, I have only exchanged eye contacts with approximately five people of the opposite sex in five years. Consequently, I have spent so many lonely and boring evenings that could have been nice.
Living a foreign life is an ambivalent experience. It is wonderfully painful. It is a difficult and long fight to stop the painful part of this new life. One has to be strong, both physically and mentally to prevent the pains so caused from becoming a chronic condition and from collapsing during the suffering of them.
