What We Learn Along the Way
At 18, I finished high school and had no idea what I wanted to study. I liked too many things and couldn’t quite decide on any of them. Until I heard that some friends were going to Boston to improve their English, and I thought, “Chau, I’m leaving.” I made my decision much later than they did, so I ended up traveling alone. For the first few months, I lived in a residence at Boston University, and then I rented an apartment nearby to continue studying. I had gone there to learn English, but I ended up learning a lot more about how to manage on my own.
I met people from all over the world and faced my first real problems. I still remember when the owner of my apartment didn’t want to return my security deposit. I got so angry that I spent the entire afternoon crying under a tree, not knowing what to do. Until then, many of those situations had been handled by others for me. That year, I also spent a month backpacking through Canada, which gave my mother a few headaches. Looking back, I studied less than I had planned, but I lived so much more. I learned to manage on my own, to communicate with people completely different from me, to make mistakes and to keep going.
Today, every time I travel to a new country or walk into a meeting with someone I don’t know, I feel that something of that 18-year-old girl is still there. I’m still very much the kind of person who faces things first and figures out what happens next. And I think a lot of that started in Boston.
The photo accompanying this story is from another trip, many years later. I have very few photographs from Boston, mostly shared with me by friends who were there at the same time. Back then, we took pictures on film. Mine were still undeveloped, packed inside my suitcase, when the airline lost it. I cried a lot because I felt I had lost all the memories of that year. But as I write this, I realize just how many of those memories have stayed with me.
And I sometimes wonder, if your 18-year-old child told you they wanted to leave and experience something like this, how would you feel?