Fun Facts About First Arrival In America (5), Run, The Roof Is Falling Down
My boss, Dr. Anderson, was the head of the department. He was very friendly to Chinese students. He recruited several Chinese doctoral students in the department. During my years at school, he had always been concerned about me. When I went to his office, I often saw him playing video games on the computer. He always told me that you must learn computers well, and you would need to have good computer skills in many jobs in the future. Back then at school, most of the professors didn’t allow their students to take computer classes, because many students got a computer degree, got a job, and ran away.
I took a computer class every semester, but my advisor, Dr. Cool, didn’t know about it. Later, Dr. Cool was promoted to the graduate school and became the dean. She soon found out that I had taken a lot of computer courses, so she went to Dr. Anderson to give a small report. One day, I was in Dr. Anderson’s office. Dr. Cool called him and asked him if he knew that John was taking a computer course. Dr. Anderson replied that he knew, and Dr. Cool didn’t say anything after hearing it. In fact, I have never talked to Dr. Anderson about the fact that I took computer courses. I was worried that he would ask me to ask the instructor Dr. Cool. If Dr. Cool disagreed, it would become a troublesome matter.
Before my wife came to the United States, it was a dream to have another child, but this matter still puts a lot of pressure on me. One was that I had just started learning, and another was a big financial problem. At that time, my monthly research grant was only US$550, which was the entire monthly living expenses of our family of three, and we were still very tight financially. But in the end, the wife had the final say, and she decided to have another child. Although we were under financial pressure, we still comforted ourselves, believing that we would be able to support our children in the United States, and the sky would not collapse if there was one more child in the family.
The medical expenses of giving birth in the United States were very high. In order to buy student medical insurance, my wife took English classes at school, and we also borrowed $3,000 from relatives to pay the tuition. After the school started, my wife became a student in the English class. After learning English for two semesters, her English level also improved by leaps and bounds. A year later, we had our second child. At that time, there were dozens of families from mainland China in our university town. Everyone was still adhering to family planning, and they all had only one child. Therefore, we were the rare guerrillas on campus.
Studying as a graduate student in the United States, and at the same time earning money to support my family, was a challenge I had never had before, and it could be said to be a lot of pressure. Not long after I got the car, I met Jay, a good friend of Dr. Anderson. He was a small boss and could do carpentry. He often bought some old houses at a low price and sold them at a high price after renovation. In addition, he also helped the sports teams of several nearby universities to manage, collect and dispose of the old textbooks used by students. Jay was very hardworking and didn’t talk too much. His business was very flexible. He always had endless work and often asked temporary workers to help. Since I met him, I had to drive more than 30 miles to Jay almost every weekend. In the small town where he lived, he went to work as a handyman for him.
Working for Jay was low wages, he paid me six dollars an hour, billed every day. Even at that time, in that remote small city, few young and strong people were willing to do heavy physical work for six dollars an hour. I worked very hard, had good physical strength, and was not lazy. Jay was very relieved of my work, and he liked to hire cheap labor like me. once. Jay told me, “Labor like you is too cheap. I can’t find local people to work for six dollars an hour, and there are very few people who are willing to work, and they work for a few days and quit.” Because, in the university town There weren’t many job opportunities, especially fewer on weekends. For me, there was such a flexible job, and I also liked it very much. Although the income was very low, I could earn tens of dollars a day for each job. This income relieved a lot of financial pressure on our family.
During the summer vacation, Jay was very busy. He had a large number of old textbooks used by students that need to be collected and processed, and then sent to each university after sorting. Coupled with some of his housing projects, he was busy from morning to night every day. After the summer vacation, I worked at Jay’s for eight hours during the day, and after get off work, I drove to an American restaurant to work as a dishwasher, and I didn’t go home until after ten o’clock at night. At that time, all I wanted was to make more money, and I really wanted to make money. I worked six days a week for more than two months, earning a total of more than five thousand dollars. Not only did we pay off the three thousand dollars in debt, but we also had some savings, which was a small achievement for us at the time.
Later, Jay bought a large old hotel with three floors. He planned to convert it into a rental property by removing the entire old roof, installing a new one, and redecorating the inside. For a small business owner liked Jay, this project was really big. I remembered that on the day before Christmas that year, the weather was very cold and the wind was biting. I was alone on the cement roof of the dilapidated hotel, tearing down the old walls and moving garbage all day. The dilapidated roof had many big holes. , If you were not careful, you would fall to the second floor. It was really not easy to do manual labor to earn money to support a family.
After about a few months, the capable Jay had the new roof replaced. One afternoon, when Jay wasn’t on the job site, he asked me and a guy to tear down some old walls on the second floor of an old hotel. I just knocked down a wooden pillar, and after a while, I heard a rattling, rattling, rattling sound on the third floor, and the sound became louder and louder. The young man hurried up to the third floor to have a look, and suddenly shouted “Oh my God, the roof has collapsed, run!” He ran out quickly along the stairs in panic, I didn’t know what happened upstairs, I He was also scared and ran out of the house after him. We waited outside for a while, but didn’t hear any big movements in the house, and the rattling noises became smaller and smaller. So we decided to go upstairs to see what happened. We cautiously came to the third floor. It turned out that a large piece of the newly built roof was deforming and sinking, but the roof did not collapse. We quickly moved a few large logs to support the main beam of the roof, and controlled the roof from sinking. Soon, Jay came back, saw the sinking roof, shook his head, didn’t say anything, he didn’t know how that big piece of roof partly collapsed, and he didn’t know that the roof started to rattle shortly after I knocked off a head , rattle. Later, it took us more than a month and many jacks to slowly correct the collapsed part of the roof.
After this incident, I thought my safety was more important than making money, and soon I quitted my temporary job with Jay and started to devote myself to studying. At that time, the director of the CS department was very strict. When I applied for the evaluation of computer graduate students, he asked me to take 14 undergraduate computer courses. However, through the training of these basic courses, my computer skills had also made great progress, which also gave me Later, I laid a good foundation for the study and work of graduate students in computer science. It took me two and a half years to complete these basic courses and my graduate degree in this major. Then, I successfully applied for the postgraduate major in computer science, and got tuition-free funding to start my postgraduate study in computer science.
Two years of postgraduate study in computer science, although I encountered many difficulties and challenges, I finally achieved my intended goal. A few months before graduation, I began to face the problem of finding a job. At that time, we already had three children. I had mixed emotions, mixed with joy and nervousness. Excited that I was finally graduating soon, and nervous that I really didn’t know where to find a job. Although I had taken a lot of computer courses, I didn’t have any work experience, and I didn’t have any interview experience. When I faced the choice, I didn’t know what to do.
There was still more than a month before graduation, and some students had already found jobs. There were also many students who plan to go to big cities and then started looking for jobs. Memphis is very close to our school, not very developed, and many Chinese students did’t like to go there. One day, in a job advertisement in a newspaper on a weekend, I saw that a publishing house in Memphis wanted a Java programmer. The job requirements seemed relatively high, and three years of experience was required. I felt that my conditions were not good enough and I didn’t dare to apply. In fact, I was scaring myself. On the weekend of the second week, I saw the advertisement again, and I thought no matter what the result was, I would try to send a resume to this company first. At that time, applying for a job was still very primitive, so all resumes had to be applied by mail through the post office. Unexpectedly, a few days later, I received an interview notice from the company.
On the day of the interview, I put on a suit and tie, and drove to the location of Memphis Company early in the morning. I got there more than ten minutes early, and I was very nervous, and I didn’t have the confidence at all. The IT manager who received me was very friendly. He briefly introduced the situation of their company to me, and he told me that their programmers and supervisors are not here today. He asked me a few simple and common questions, whether I am interested in working in a small company, and whether I know Java, and I showed him a stack of Java programs I had pre-printed, and he looked at it and said, “ Wow, that’s nice, you wrote Java”. He was very interested in my project on fast search, and he told me that one of their projects was also related to search. He said that working in a small company is very good and very flexible. He and several employees in his group all came here from large companies. Then, he took me to look at the window and told me that the company was on a main street in the city center, and the surrounding environment was very good and safe. The interview went very smoothly, and the 30 minutes were over quickly. The next day, I received an email from my manager about job opportunities, telling me how much my annual salary would be, and hoped that I would start working next week. A few days later, I received an official notice from the company. It was beyond my expectation that everything came so quickly and in a timely manner. The small company was really efficient, and the manager has the final say on everything.
In fact, at that time, not everyone who studied computer could find a job as smoothly as I did. Another classmate who graduated with me had very good conditions. He was a young Ph.D. He didn’t find a job for more than a month, and then he went to Dallas to find a company that beckoned to him. So, I was really blessed to have such an opportunity.
In June 1998, we left school and moved to Memphis to start our new life journey. In the past few years, I had been studying while supporting my family. I had challenged my abilities, and I had gained a lot. I had two master degrees and three children. In particular, I fulfilled one of my greatest wishes, to change careers and gained a foothold in the United States. These difficult experiences had made me deeply moved. At every stage of life, we will encounter many choices, and there are many things that we must actively face, search for, and try. We are constantly searching throughout our lives, looking for schools, jobs, partners, and doctors. For ordinary people, in many cases, opportunities are not equal. If we don’t actively look for opportunities, opportunities will never fall from the sky. We are often constrained by our own self-esteem, too concerned about face, afraid of failure, doubting our ability, and worrying about being rejected. If we can learn not to care about our own face, seize the opportunities that come to us, and keep trying, we will find that we actually have a lot of potential, and we can get more opportunities to do a lot of things that we thought were impossible in the past. This is also what we often say that people plan things and make things happen.
