Personal Narrative: My Trip To Chinatown

As a cultural experience, I took a trip to Chinatown. Both my sister and I were adopted from China, and because of that, I have not grown up in an environment where I am surrounded by Chinese culture. Despite my parents’ best efforts to provide an awareness of our heritage (which I strongly appreciate), I still feel a large disconnect with my racial identity. I enjoyed going to all the little shops, eating Chinese food, and practicing my Chinese by reading any label, sign, or store name I saw. I loved going to Chinatown because even though it’s not actually China, I feel like it’s the closest I can get for the time being.
For a culinary experience, My sister, her roommate, and I went to the restaurant Ramen House. My mom had heard about the
Instead of watching TV, I read books. In total I read seven books: Before I go to Sleep, The Templar Legacy, A Long Way Gone, Their Eyes were Watching God, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Secret of Bees and The Kite Runner. My favorite out of all of those books was A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. It was the touching and emotional true story of how Ishmael Beah grew up in Sierra Leone during the middle of a civil war, and his journey of losing his family, surviving all on his own, becoming a child soldier, going through rehabilitation, and finally coming to live in America. I am honestly really glad that I stopped watching TV and decided to read instead because, during the school year, it's really easy for me to forget how much I love to read and how amazing books can
I play the flute in band, which means that I have to participate in marching and pep band. For the majority of the time we are at football and basketball games, we just sit in the stands without playing our instruments. Typically, these games can get very boring because everyone just looks at their phones the whole time, waiting for the drum majors to tell us what song to play. This year, however, was a lot more fun because my friends and I came up with games to play every marching and pep band event. We played card games, including BS, Egyptian Rat Screw, and Spoons, as well as word games such as Psych and Contact. One of my favorite games to pay was Mafia. In the game, a person acts as the fairy godmother and assigns everyone a role: mafia, detective, nurse, or civilian. The goal for the mafia is to kill everyone before they discover who the mafia is. Everyone else tries to figure out who the mafia is by using psychological reasoning. Once they agree that someone is the Mafia, they kill them by a majority vote. When each person dies, the fairy godmother has to make up the story of how they died. The reason why this game was so fun was because of the amount of creativity involved. The stories of how people died were hilarious and the reasoning people used to accuse each other of being the mafia were equally outrageous. Each band event was a couple of hours long, so we always had plenty of time