While I did immigrate to America, moving to NY is one of the most significant times in my life. I was depressed having to leave a place I called home for two years to a place where I knew practically no one and nowhere. In the basement of our new apartment building, there were these donation boxes where people left their old clothes and books in which I frequented the book boxes, and in my first week in New York, I found these books called “Nim’s Island” and “Absolutely Normal Chaos” and a battered copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”. It’s cheesy to say that books take you to glamorous places but they did to me...here I could get caught up in someone else’s perfect life and escape the troubles of my own. These novels have no significance whatsoever to my family, but to me they mean the world. Being an immigrant I have realized that even when you are experiencing events with someone, you each have your own recollection… your own immigrant story. Occasionally, when I feel lonely I revisit these novels… I reread and reread them because they remind me of a time when I could find happiness despite feeling unhappy. People immigrate to find better, so I guess my real immigration story is whenever I read a novel because I turn to the first page hoping to find an exciting world that is slightly better than the one I live in.

– Zoe N.

Relationship:  Im/migrant who arrived as a child Im/migrant who arrived as a child