Memoir Essay Example
Life is an endless journey that once must travel despite the obstacles. My journey had started on one Sunday in January 2012; it still vividly alive in my memory. It was the time that my parent told me that my education is the top priority, it is the reason for their decision to move to Australia. It was such an unpleasant feeling when I had to leave everything behind, including my friends and extended family in Vietnam to begin a new life in a place I never heard of. As the Qantas’ aeroplane began moving along the runway, I pressed my face onto the window looking at the small silhouette at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport. Many of my friends and family had come to bid farewell, I could recognise a few faces as the plane passed through the gallery and began to take off. The look on their faces would engrave into my mind for eternity.
It’s such an irony that I had ended up in Australia when the English language was always the Everest mountain for me. Unfortunately, everything did not go well on my first day of school in the new place. Even though I had the privilege to study in the class designed specifically for ESL students. It seemed my classmates felt joyful bullying a newcomer with my appearance and terrible accent. There were many decisions I could have made, and it definitely will result in a better outcome, but I chose to stay quiet. People said fight or flight, I chose flight; flew away from the battle that I was destined to conquer. I knew their cruel act, their laugh and smirk silhouette still haunted in every of my nightmare.
Eventually, my classmates started to get bored and stopped bothering me. However, I had lost something far beyond my imagination. It is the courage of standing up for something I believed in. If people flew away from battles, it would be the basis for the next forfeit. This very well applied to me as I always forfeited to any difficult challenges I encountered on my journey. Nevertheless, I could not trust anyone in this world from that dreadful experience, my world only remaining with the colour of black and white. Before I came to Australia, I had tons of friends and people called me seven-eleven because I am an enthusiastic person, but over time that I lived in Australia, I became a broken machine, quieter than ever before. While other people interacted with their friends, I found myself locked in a twenty-metre squared room and becoming another person in the virtual world.
“Find yourself some true friends or you will be lonely.” My mother continuously hanging these words in her mouth every time she saw my eyes stared at the technology devices. She would not understand how frightening the world was to an eleven-year-old boy after everything I had experienced. One can only understand the loneliness when they experienced it, the feeling of having no one on your side. Loneliness is like a blast of frigid air sinking into the marrow of my bones like wet concrete. I do not want to be the centre of humiliation in front of others once again. On the other hand, without friends I just like a lone wolf in the winter night, waiting to be swallowed to death by the superior predator. From ever since, to protect myself from that miserable experience, and find myself a position in this society, I put on a fake smile to hide my true feeling from people around me.
Until now, when reflected to those experiences, I just felt myself being so naïve. Even though life is not always as pleasing as I desire, it taught me a valuable lesson that unobtainable in any other way. It became part of who I am, the way I act, view, judge and behave in different situations. Without those experiences to pave the road, I would only see the surface level of this world, acknowledge the concept people injected in me and I would have been in disadvantage for many situations. The experience I gained from the past, to an extent, assisting my role as the captain that support other school mates, especially people from English as a second language background as I am. Life contains a series of joyful, misfortune, resentment, regretful. There will always be a challenge ahead of my journey, but I am the one who decided to stop or continue. The unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates).
