by Jimmy Liu（junhua Liu）, staff writer
Reading is something that I hate a lot about school, especially since I immigrated to America. When I first started learning how to read English books, all I could see in a book were random alphabet letters, stuck together. All I could feel was hopeless; I would often stare at my friends, thinking: ” Am I that stupid?”
Edwin and Anita Lee Newcomer School, also known as CEC, was the first American school that I went to during fourth grade. It was a school for young Chinese immigrants to learn English and to “survive” in the US. It’s also the place where my toxic relationship with reading English books begins.
One day, when we had an assignment to read 10 pages of a book called “The Boxcar Children”, which was for 2nd to 6th graders. Even though I was in 4th grade already, I had no idea what the book was about. For a long time, I had been struggling with homework that required reading; it was extremely difficult for me, and my parents were always disappointed in me for having a “C” as my grade.
I was afraid to tell anyone about it because I had bad grades in it and I didn’t want to be excluded by my classmates. All my friends didn’t seem to have trouble with reading like me. I never asked anyone about it, and I started avoiding my friends. I thought that if I don’t talk to them much, I won’t expose myself. Since then, they kept asking me what was wrong or if they did something wrong. They must have thought that I’m mad at them or something because As they talk to me more, I become more afraid to talk to people.
In fifth grade, I went to another elementary school called Jean Parker, which made me even more scared since most of my friends were at CEC. This transfer meant that I would have to go to a new place with more strangers and harder books. Teachers at Jean Parker were unlike CEC because most of them did not know Chinese, which meant it was really hard to have someone to explain the books to me. I felt like I couldn’t really get help from anyone other than my classmates and friends, so the fifth grade is also the time when I feel really hopeless.
But in middle school things started changing and I really felt like I was learning. I would say visiting the school library was one of the most genius decisions I’ve ever made, I actually found some English books I was interested in. Not long after, I started to spend more and more of my time reading in the library, from comics to novels, books with lower reading levels to books much higher, more challenging reading levels. It’s the first time that I actually enjoyed English books.
The more I read, the more vocabulary I learned. Reading books has not only helped me improve my grades, but also helped me improve my exams. I was finally able to score higher on the reading test and Stabilized my fluctuating grade to a solid B. My friends were amazed at my reading ability, and I’ve finally crossed the biggest obstacle I’ve had in years.
