Deeply etched in my mind amongst all those distant childhood memories,
was the image of my mother's tears streaming down her face that day in the fall of 1975.
My family has, like so many other Taiwanese families,
just arrived in that exotic foreign land;
a place of which we had previously imagined to be a dessert instead of a modern city.
There was this question of what to do about our education. Surely we could not go into the local schools,
for there was no way we could have mastered Farsi.
Here was this American school, but our applications were repeatedly rejected. We spoke no English, and would not be able to participate in class. That was the answer from the school.
I do remember the gatherings and meetings of the parents,
trying to solve the problem of our education.
They had visited the American school's administrator on multiple occasions. Time and time again they were turned away,
yet the brave and determined mothers still came back. They themselves spoke little English and had to work through an interpreter.
It was at the end of one of these meetings, very probably the last one,
which all the mothers who were there cried. I was there. I stood there and watched silently as the tears streamed down my mother's cheeks.
A thought went through my nine year old head. "Never! Never again do I want to see my mother shed tears again!"
Something good happened after that last meeting,
for I got into this ESL class within this American school. Did they set up this ESL class especially for us? I'll never know, but I do know that we would not have had what we have now,
if not for the persistence of these beautiful mothers.
PS: Thus began many nights of memorizing vocabulary and just plain trying to cope with grammar. At the end of the ESL course, we were sent to different grade levels, depending on our mastery of the English language.