Tim Xu

The following is my finished essay for English 120: Reading & Writing the Modern Essay with Professor Ariel Watson. This particular unit is entitled “From Personal Experience.”

On the first day of pre-school, my new teacher asked me for my name, so I replied, “I want to go to the bathroom.” It was my first day of pre-school; I was four, and I didn’t have a lick of English in my head. Earlier in the morning, my parents had given me strict directions: don’t eat anything that doesn’t smell right; don’t take food from other children without asking; if you need to pee, tell the teacher “I want to go to the bathroom”; eat all the food in your lunchbox. And so, after my teacher asked for my name, I decided to reply with the phrase my parents had taught me in the morning. My teacher, my parents, and, I’m sure, many of the other children laughed. I did not. But I stood silent not because of embarrassment, but because of ignorance. Not only was I incapable of understanding my teacher’s question, I did not even truly comprehend the words that came out of my own mouth. Fortunately, there were no major consequences from my mistake – I did not become “I-want-to-go-to-the-bathroom” for the rest of the year. The teacher already knew my real name. In fact, she gave me my name.

In the most literal sense, my pre-school teacher forged my identity as an American. My parents had realized that my given Chinese name could be a liability for my social success and so, when they sat down with my pre-school teacher in the weeks prior to that first day, they asked her for ideas. They gave her my Chinese name, and she picked an English name that sounded closest to it. “Tim,” she told them. For the next fourteen years (and counting), I would answer to that name. My birth certificate reads ‘Xu Tianji,’ born in Xi’an, China, but since I was four, I have answered, as an American, to the name she gave me.

When I was two, my parents left me in the care of my mother’s mother in China while they established a new life in America. While I ran about in cloth diapers on dusty streets, they enjoyed their first meal at McDonald’s: a sixty-nine cent hamburger that they shared because it was all they could afford. I followed their trail a year later, boarding a fifteen-hour flight from Beijing to Detroit International Airport.

It had been a full year since I’d last seen my parents. Yet when my father first picked me up off the ground, I whispered into his ear, “Where’s our car?” Over the course of our overseas telephone conversations, I discovered that my parents had purchased a new vehicle. This was quite the luxury, one nearly impossible to attain for the average Chinese family at the time. Naturally, it trumped all else in my toddler mind. I was not interested in the sentimentality or emotion of the moment. Something far more important and exciting had captured my mind. During the drive home, I attached my face to the window, watching the hundreds of cars and their shining, spinning rims in awe. At one point, we stopped at a traffic light next to a large tractor-trailer. Moments later, I wondered why we were moving backwards.

In those early days, our apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise in the center of Detroit’s Wayne State University, where my parents did their graduate studies. I spent the first weeks at home with my grandmother, playing inside the apartment or outside in the playground. We were quite the pair, with no more than a dozen English phrases between us. But we quickly mastered the essential art of hand gestures and awkward grunts, our only method of communicating with the neighborhood children and their mothers. It must have been how the cavemen conversed tens of thousands of years ago. I would wave to say hello, then point from myself to the swing a few times, as if to ask, “Can I please use that swing you’re sitting on?” Finally, with a handful of nods or shakes of the head, I would either get onto my newly won swing, or storm away from the stubborn child who had refused my negotiations.

Of course, it did not always work. My parents often socialized with their fellow students, two of whom also had children of their own. They were older than me, the two girls, and they, too, had recently moved from China. Without a language barrier, we quickly became friends. However, they moved to America several years before I did, and thus already spoke English well. They readily used this advantage against me. Whenever they wished to ignore or exclude me, they did. I could only complain to my grandmother, “They’re speaking English again!”

A month later, the first day of pre-school came and passed. I learned English quickly – with no one there who could speak Chinese, pre-school forced me to speak English. By that Christmas, I was speaking in full phrases. By the next one, I was fluent. The girls could no longer ignore me by merely speaking English (though I quickly discovered that locked doors can be just as potent). I did not have to rely on wild hand motions – negotiating swings and see-saws became a matter of voice.

I could not have understood the significance of those first few months in America. In April of 1994, I was Xu Tianji, a Chinese toddler waddling down the dirty, cramped streets of Xi’an in hand-sewn pants and paper-thin shoes. By the time 1995 dawned, I was Tim Xu, an American boy running through the wide, grassy lawns of Detroit in cheap pants and sneakers. Perhaps that lack of understanding was exactly what enabled me to become so unmistakably American as quickly as I did. With an American name given to me by an American woman in an American city, I did not find my new identity – I was given it. I became Tim Xu not because I wanted to, but because my pre-school teacher thought it sounded like the name inscribed on my birth certificate.

I was too young to understand the remarkable nature of those opening months in America. I had passed through the ugly cruelties of adjusting to a new country relatively unscathed. Unlike my parents, I did not have to worry about my professional reputation, about creating a financial base from scratch, about starting over as an adult. My age, then, was my crutch, my get-out-of-hardship-free card. By the time I started kindergarten, I was more American than my parents would ever be. I had forgotten what life was like in China. Although I would not legally become an American citizen for another eight years, I was no longer a true Chinese citizen the day I stepped foot on American soil. At the age of three, I held only the most tenuous connection to a national identity. It was in the hurried process of learning English, of adapting to America’s culture that I assumed its identity and melted into its churning pot.

When I walked into that classroom for the first day of pre-school, I didn’t realize that all the other children looked different. Some were white, others black, but none were yellow-skinned. I didn’t realize the true difficulty of becoming fluent in a completely foreign language. And I certainly didn’t realize that this new ‘me’ could bring me so far.