6/1/2023 0 Comments Growing up poorBut to make a reservation, you must have at least 10 people. Growing up, learning to be resourceful became a regular part of my identity. When I moved to San Fransisco, a few friends and I wanted to have lunch at a popular restaurant that had an 1-2 hour wait unless you came with a reservation. When we came back from our vacation we learned that 2 homes had been robbed a street down, but our house had not been hit. The day before we left, my grandfather closed all the blinds to prevent anyone from peeking in, put the radio on a Vietnamese radio station so it would seem people were talking from within the house, and he allowed our neighbors who normally parked in our street, to park on our driveway so it seemed that people were entering and leaving. ⌄ Scroll down to continue reading article ⌄ My grandfather didn’t let this deter him from enjoying vacation with his family. Our neighborhood was known for high levels of robberies and we didn’t have an alarm system to protect the house while we were gone. When my family took our first vacation, we encountered a problem we hadn’t thought about before. When you are generous to others, others will be generous towards you. Many of them became my grandmother’s life-long customers and even though my grandmother is now retired, she still gets requests from them to give them manicures and is able to live comfortably in retirement. The people my grandmother fed brought their daughters, their friends, and their co-workers. Years later, when my grandmother opened up her own nail salon in our neighborhood, her first customers were many of the families she welcomed into our home all those years earlier. Sunday dinners were spent with people from all races and backgrounds and my grandma always made sure noone left hungry. When my family first came to the United States, they barely had enough to get by, but my grandmother Rose, the matriarch of our family, always opened our home to those who had even less than us. If you’re poor, most likely your friends are too and you either learn to look after one another or suffer together. The more you give, the more it comes back to you Only in adulthood am I beginning to see how my experiences growing up impoverished has positively shaped who I am and what I’ve been able to accomplish in my life. I viewed my upbringing only through the lens of what I missed out on instead of what I gained. As a kid, I thought about all the negatives of my situation – eating instant noodles for the 5th time in a week does that to you – and when I started as a freshman at a college I felt inferior to my more affluent peers because I lacked the culture, the sophistication, and the elegance I saw they had. Sometimes you look at more well-off families with envy. Many of the common conveniences my friends had I didn’t and when you grow up poor, you often imagine what it would be like had your family been wealthy. At one point we had 11 people sharing 4 rooms and 1 bathroom. To save costs they would take any job that would accept them, mostly 16-hour factory shifts, and lived together to reduce rent even as our family expanded. When my family immigrated to the United States, they had $200 between the six of them.
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