Lim Jung-Yun/ Chapter 4 essay final draft/ Narrative Composition Tue 3 4

My British Silver Lining

 

 In my Junior year, I spent a semester abroad in the UK as an exchange student. My fantasies of a promising semester filled with exciting opportunities of parties, making friends with British students, and studying outside on campus grounds was thwarted quickly. The ghastly weather and crushing work load was tough but not enough to crush my spirits. What tormented me the most was the racist behavior of the fellow students.  A few incidents involving racial slurs and a water balloon that was aimed and hit right at me was enough to make me fed up with the entire "British Experience".

 When times got hard, I locked myself into my dorm room which I had all to myself. It was a tiny room but it wasn't a shabby one. In fact, the small size of the room along with the earthy colors of the  green bed covers and beige wallpaper gave a feeling of coziness and warmth. It had all the things I needed, a bed, a desk, and even a bathroom with a shower. When I was feeling low, I spent the weekends in my room crying through my days in Britain. After finishing classes, I would run back to my dorm room with bags of chips and drown them down with beer while watching soap operas on my laptop. I admit, it was quite a low point in my life, but the fact that I always had a place where I could be all by myself free from the taunts and hurtful remarks of the foreign country I was stuck in somehow always comforted me.

 After a while, I bonded with two other Korean friends who were also exchange students. They too were also struggling with the gap between the exchange student life they expected and actual reality. It became a nightly ritual for the three of us to gather and talk about our day. Just being able to about the hardships of the day was a relief. We could not bear to talk about our day-to-day struggle with our parents who would be worried sick, or to our friends back in Korea who expected to hear marvelous tales of a romantic semester abroad. But nothing was off-limits with the three of us. We got really close in such a short span of time and soon we were inseparable.  As my room was the biggest, we almost always met at my room. We would talk, cry, but mostly laughed till our sides ached. Then we would all fall asleep on my bed which was crowded, but no one would let each other sleep on the floor. I no longer spent my days in my room feeling lonely and alone.

 My time in Britain was awful and terrible but I do not regret it. The two girls who helped me through such a hard time are still my best friends till this day and I am thankful to have met them every day. The tiny room with the green bed covers and beige wallpaper with a shower has a fond place in my heart. It is a place that comforted me when I had no one, and later on it became a place that helped me bond with two of the most important people in my life.