I’ll have been in U.S. for one year tomorrow. In the year of 2009 on Aug 28th, I said goodbye to my parents at PuDong international airport and then took Delta Airplane with my friend to Atlanta first and then Boston. We arrived at Boston at midnight on Aug 28th. There was a very heavy rain that night and the plane was also delayed due to the bad weather. At Logan airport, I met my cousin, whom I haven’t seen for more than ten years. When he left China, I was a little girl who just started primary school studies; but now, I’ve changed so much that he couldn’t even recognize me. How time flies!
During the past year, I’ve experienced so many things that it is impossible to summarize them all in my blog. There is joy and delight, but there is also sorrow and bitterness. There are plenty of trials, but consolation is even more. Experiences are really precious for me, since they taught me to be more mature, more independent, to solve problems by myself and to adjust myself to different circumstances in life.
I’m grateful to the people who have helped me a lot in the past year: family members, classmates, friends and so on. As to the people who have hurt me deeply and left a shadow in my mind, I should learn to forgive and forget. After all, I need to learn how to deal with different tyes of people. Not everyone is angel, neither are they demons. Gradually I began to discover goodness in every person and stop making judgements on others.
As to my PhD study, I really should be more confident. Studying in a foreign country, not only other people doubt my ability, I also doubt myself from time to time. My advisor always ask me "Do you understand?" "You see what I mean?" It seems that he really distrust me. That distrust makes me begin to question myself. Am I really foolish? But after one year study, I think I should confidently say "No". It is true that I couldn’t find proper terms or words to express what I think and this still happens now. But that’s the language part. Intellectually, I find that Chinese is not inferior to other races. When I took an Organic Chemistry course, my advisor even told the course lecturer that I did not do organic chem before, so I met have a lot of difficulties taking this course. But my ability even surprises me. In the midterm exam, I obtained the highest score among all the five grad students who took that course. That case gave me considerable encouragement. I should still work on my English to express my idea freely. But the most important thing is to be confident of myself. I don’t know if I really want to be a scientist, but I should not doubt my ability, the ability that enables me to do sth well.
Except chemistry study, the thing that makes me really happy in my past year is reading. I love reading always. When I was in college, I always came to library during the weekend and read books that I’m interested in: history, philosophy, humanity, religion and so on. This stopped in my senior year, because I was busy with application at that time. It’s really amazing I picked up reading again. I bought two books with my first salary in my life: The Seven Storey Mountain and a biography on Pope John XXIII. Ever since then, I began to buy one or two books every month when I got the pay check. Later I discovered the richness of our college library. We could take as many books as we can at one time and keep them up to a year! The I began to borrow books from library instead of buying them. I read some books that are very influential in my life: Beyond East and West (John C. H. Wu), The Seven Storey Mountain (Thomas Merton), The Inner Voice of Love (Henry Nouwen), The Story of a Soul (St. Therese of Lisieux) and so on. They enlightened me a lot and deepened my understanding on Faith and a lot of other things. Through reading, I finally discerned what’s the most important thing in my life, that is to say, what should I be attached to in my life and what should I be detached from in my life.
In the end, I want to quote the words from 2Corinthians as a summary: "We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed". In addition, I should also quote the words from Philippians as a reminder: " Just one thing: forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus. "