What's a Taiwanese Immigrant's Experience in the U.S. Like?
Dear Friends,
I’m glad you found me here. My name is Allison Hong Merrill. I was born and raised in Taiwan and arrived in the U.S. at age twenty-two as a university student.
(My mother, my sisters, and I at Chiang-Kai Shek International Airport, Taiwan)
That's when I realized my school English wasn't much help when asking for directions on the street or opening a bank account. By recording each of the classes I took––including physical education––and reviewing the tape every night for a year, I eventually learned English well enough to earn an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. But please excuse me if I misuse the verb tenses or mix up the genders in third-person pronouns when I speak. It's no secret; English is a hard language to learn.
I write in both Chinese and English, both fiction and creative nonfiction, which means I spend a lot of time looking up words on Dictionary.com. My work has won both national and international contests.
(I won National Championship in the Life Story Writing Competition. May 2010.)
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