Jasmin 1

Jemma Jasmin
Professor Vana Derohassian
English 115

The Foreign Girl

I was two years old when I came to the United States in December 1999 from the
Philippines. My dad and I had to leave my mother and brother due to technicalities of American
petitions. I was devastated. On the way to the airport, I was hysterically crying. Eventually, I
would fall asleep but then wake up and start crying again. I was too young to understand why I
had to leave but it was best thing for our family. I had family in the U.S. but they had only lived
in the states a year before my welcoming. So growing up, I did not learn much English. Instead
of English, I was speaking Illokano, a dialect in the Philippines. So when it was time for me go
to school, everything was new for me, and I did not completely understand much of what my
teachers and classmates were telling me the first few months. Reading and writing were always
difficult for me growing up because of my background, but as I continued and slowly matured, I
developed interest in books and learned how to write various papers.
I attended Allesandro Elementary School. The first day of school I had to get up at five in
the morning to get ready and catch the school bus at six. It was 5:45 when my dad and my cousin
Analiza walked to the bus stop. When we arrived at the bus stop, I met a woman I used to call
Ms. Potato because I could not pronounce her name, but it sounded like potato. I hid behind
Analiza when I met her. Ms.Potato was there to supervise over all the new kindergarteners.
When it was time for me to get on the school bus, I refused to go inside. My dad took me aside
and told me to stop crying and go with Ms.Potato. My dad handed me over to Ms.Potato, and she
took out her hand out for me to hold to get on the bus. I had the window seat and was still crying

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while the bus drove away from my dad and cousin. I had only been in the U.S. for two years
when I started school. I was nervous because I did not have anyone there with me. All I knew
was to listen and try to understand what Ms.Potato would tell me to. I was not exposed to this
much in English. At home, I spoke Illokano. Before I started school, my dad taught me how to
say, Hello, my name is Jemma Jasmin. and other basic English language. In an article called
Mothers Tongue, written by Amy Tan wrote, Sociologists and linguists probably will tell
you that a persons developing language skills are more influenced by peers. However, I think
that language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families, which are more insular,
plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. My dads English was broken, as Tan
describes it in her article Mother Tongue. So only learning English from my dad, I also had
broken English when I came to school.
As I grew older, English had become more than words to match the letter of the alphabet.
Do you remember back in elementary you had to read an excerpt from a book and the teacher
would time you to see how many words you can read in a minute? Well, I was never good at
that. Before it was my turn, I would sit in my chair overthinking and stressing out in fear it
would go horribly wrong. I was not a fast reader nor was I good in pronouncing new words, I
would stumble and pause on every word I did not know and that would cause me never reach the
amount of words we were supposed to read. I also had an accent to I spoke up so I felt stupid
because my accent was thick which made hesitate every time I read. I hated English for a period
of time. Also in every class, we had popcorn reading when we were called on we would had
read aloud and reading in front of a class was also a fear of mine because I felt other students
would tease on how I read. I would panic when my name was call because I knew I stumble on
words and my accent would come out and I could not read slowly and pronounce each word

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because then other students would judge me saying, Oh, that girl is slow, she must be stupid. I
do not have really much confidence in myself when it came to reading.
It took time for me to become interested in books. In middle school, my cousin Jessica
recommended an Ellen Hopkins book called Burn. Ellen Hopkin books were very thick but once
you open her books, there was only a few lines in each page and they look like poems, some of
the pages drew a picture or some pages you had to read up and down not straight across. It was
not an ordinary book with only a few words so I thought to myself Why not? This is not hard.
Even though, there were little words on each word, Burn captured me and the depth within the
detail kept me interested. It is about a girl who was introduced to drugs and whenever she was on
a drug, her alter ego came out but she ended being alone when she felt most alive. From there, I
read her second book Glass. Then I eventually expanded my readings to other authors and books
with more words on the page.
From the girl, who did not want to leave her dad and cousin on the first day of school to a
girl who was afraid to stumble on words and others judging her from her accent to a girl who has
created a great interest in books as come far from where she started. In the effect of learning
English, I gained so much confidence in myself where my family stands in their English. Today,
I respond to my parents in perfect English while they still have broken English. There are
times I have to restate my sentence so they could understand me. I found a pleasure in reading
and reading boosted my confidence in writing along with some other help.
It was not until high school that I felt my writing was good enough. I juggle ideas
everywhere and somehow try to make it all sensible. When I was a freshman in high school,
everyone started talking about this teacher named Mr. Carmicle. Everyone had spoken highly on
him because of the way he taught, they describe his class as the most difficult but very

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beneficial. Mr.Carmicle was the boss hoss as everyone called him. In 11th grade, I got the
chance to work with Mr.Carmicle, one of the best teachers at Hollywood High School. Well I
hated Mr.Carmicle because he spoke very highly of himself too, which made himself cocky. I
did not like that. I may have not liked Mr.Carmicle but I sure wanted to impress him with my
writing. He would always say use words that are worth a quarter not a dime. I had a thesaurus
app on my phone while I write his essays just to try to impress him and of course reading books
and learning new words from those books helped. I would get any kind boost on my English to
try to impress this teacher and trying to impress him made me work harder to perfect everything
I had to in his class. Mr.Carmicles helped expand my vocabulary even wider. He taught us the
proper ways of doing an outline and we would write different kinds essays throughout the year
which lead up to our big paper which was a five to six page research paper. He taught us how to
insert pictures into the paper and the proper font size of the description, how to include block
quotes, and lastly to our citation page. The various essays we had done before our research paper
helped us practice to turn in a great research paper. The prep he made us do lead me to receive an
A on that research paper. Mr.Carmicle even taught us how to create a resume. I could not deny
how much of a help he was to develop my writing skills and I thank him for it. Thank you,
Mr.Carmicle.
The effects of the books I read and the teachers I learned from throughout grade school
lead me to success in English world. It took time for me to develop my reading and writing skills
because I did not grow up in an environment where English was my first language. In the
Philippines, it is very different. In the summer of 2006, I went back home to the Philippines and I
attended a fourth grade English class and they were barely learning how to create sentence using

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subjects and predicates. Being raised somewhere different and coming into something
completely new was a challenge for me but I faced that challenge and it lead to success.

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Work Cited
Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. New York: Putnam, 2003. Print