My First Paycheck

Dear Dad and Mom, I received both of your letters, the ones dated September 11th and 13th, at the same time yesterday! The one dated the 13th only took nine days to arrive. It seems letters have a mind of their own, traveling as fast or as slowly as they please.¹ I was so happy to get them! After over a month in the U.S. and three letters home, I finally received your first replies. Now that I knew you had a direct phone line installed at home, I decided to give it a try and called you last night. You mentioned that there's a slight delay during our phone conversation. That may simply be because your voice has to travel halfway around the world to reach me, and my reply has to make the same journey back before you can hear it. In other words, whenever you say something, you won't hear my response until the sound has effectively traveled around the entire globe.² So a slight delay is perfectly normal. Actually, when you think about it, isn't that amazing? Tong 09/23/95 My roommate is a young undergraduate majoring in civil engineering. Like most Chinese undergraduates here, he is a permanent resident who moved to the United States with his family. He's been in the U.S. for a few years now, and before that, he spent several years studying in Europe. He seems like a quiet, polite, and honest person. Believe it or not, my roommate's name is also Tong! If someone calls asking for "Tong," things can get a little confusing. Our next-door neighbors are two friendly Taiwanese, one undergraduate and one graduate student. Having never met anyone from Taiwan before, I was curious about them. As it turned out, they weren't all that different from us, and we naturally bonded over our shared language, food, and culture. Just last Saturday at noon, they invited us over for homemade pizza. They piled it high with all kinds of toppings and cheese, and it was absolutely delicious. At least here, cross-strait relations are very harmonious.³ At UT, probably because there are so many Chinese students, I haven't had as many opportunities to interact with Americans as I had imagined. I practice my listening every day, but I don't get to speak English all that much, and it takes time to make American friends. Fortunately, since I'm a TA, I still get to interact with students. In any case, I'm doing everything I can to find opportunities to practice my spoken English. My ability to understand lectures is improving day by day, and I can understand my Indian professor without much difficulty now. Being a TA has been pretty easy so far. I only hold two office hours a week. To make sure I know what the professor covered in class, I sit in on his lectures three times a week for forty-five minutes each. The rest of the job is just grading homework. Usually, no one shows up during my office hours, but a few days before an assignment is due, one or two students come in to ask questions. It's a little embarrassing that I still occasionally have a hard time catching what they're saying! I have an exam next Tuesday. American courses have so many more exams—about one a month per class on average—not to mention all the homework, so I've been keeping busy. Lately, I get back to the apartment around 11:00 p.m. That's when the last campus shuttle runs, and most of the people waiting for the final bus are Chinese students—they are incredibly hardworking! Moving forward, the best time for you to call me is around midnight my local time, which is 1:00 p.m. Beijing time. I’ll definitely be home by then, and I won't be asleep yet. I usually get up around 9:00 a.m. My earliest class isn't until 11:00 a.m., so I get to sleep in a bit. I've realized that I can't really afford to eat burgers regularly, as that would put me over budget. In the U.S., prepared food is expensive, while raw ingredients are cheap, so buying groceries and cooking for yourself is definitely the way to go. For example, I can buy a huge box of sixteen chicken drumsticks for just over two dollars, which is about the price of a single burger. I bake more than ten of them at a time. They turn out so delicious that it's a shame you can't taste them! I often pack two meals, both lunch and dinner, to bring to campus, though eating the same thing several days in a row gets old pretty quickly. Tong 09/27 at 1:00 a.m. P.S. I also received my first letter from Chun today. I got my first paycheck! I didn't expect it to come so soon. I had originally planned to go shopping but was worried I didn't have much money left in my checking account, so I checked my balance over the phone. To my surprise, there was actually $1,140 in it! As it turns out, today is the last day of September, which means it's payday. Today I went to the Chinese grocery store, one of only two in Austin, and bought two pounds of shrimp, a big bag of mussels, and a box of squid. This is the first time since coming to America that I've treated myself to seafood. Seafood is still expensive. The shrimp weren't even that large, but they cost $2.99 a pound. Unlike American supermarkets, the Chinese grocery store is cramped and a little damp, and carries an unpleasant smell of fish and raw meat. But I'm grateful it exists. There are things you simply can't find anywhere else. I hope this letter reaches you before Mom's birthday on October 13th. Happy Birthday, Mom! Tong 09/30/95 I just received your third letter, dated September 24th, along with Chun's second letter. She wrote that the administration at her institute had refused to issue her academic transcripts. Their preliminary decision was to delay issuing them until this time next year. If that is the case, our plans will have to be delayed—she won't be able to apply to graduate schools in the United States for the fall of 1996. Tong 10/05/95