Our Stories

Dieuner Joseph was born on April 4, 1968 in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti to Lucienne Joseph and Tardieu Joseph. He lived in Haiti with his mother, older brother, and two older sisters while his father worked in a factory in the US. When he was 14 they immigrated to the US and he became a naturalized citizen at 17. Moving to the US was challenging for him and many other Haitian immigrants for many reasons. People disliked Caribbean and African people in New Jersey at the time, which was 1982. My dad says that was one of the biggest challenges of not just him, but many Haitians as well. They were bullied, but couldn’t understand what the bullies were saying because they don’t speak English well enough. Some of them were even assaulted. Also there were many cultural difference that made assimilating into the American life different. My dad arrived in June of ‘82 and had to learn English in three months before school started. English is very different from Creole with the mouth sounds and pronunciation would make it difficult for anyone. The cultural barrier also hindered the “American dream”. America is very different from Haiti and trying to adapt to new social norms made it hard. The last difficulty he told me he had to face was that he didn’t know anyone. His parents worked and his older siblings were in college and so he had to spend a lot of time just doing school work till he met his friends, who are also Haitian immigrants. He went to Elisabeth High School in Elisabeth, New Jersey and graduated and went on to go to Manhattan college for bachelors in Theology and then went to Princeton University for a Master’s in Theology and one in Divinity. He is now a manager of a pharmaceutical company.

It was 2013, I was 13 years old and my family and I had moved from Hong Kong to Florida. We lived in Hong Kong for almost five years and moving to the United States was a great change for all of us. The moving process to different countries had been very familiar to me as I had done it multiple times over the years; nevertheless, coming to the U.S was the one of most difficult moves of all. Due to a change in my father’s career path, his job lead us all the way to The United States. We were well unaware of what was to come.  My personal experience was a little frightening and intimidating due to my lack of American knowledge.

I had been learning English in Hong Kong for quite some time, but speaking it in America was drastically different to what I was used to. I had to pick up the new dialect very quickly which took lots of time and effort. The food, culture, and laws were also all brand new to me.  I was not familiar with the school system, let alone the social expectations in America. Having to pick up and learn these new cultural differences, expectations, laws and systems was very challenging. Since I went straight into private school, the workload I had received was incomparable to what I had in Hong Kong. While living in Asia, I played cricket and rugby. When I moved to the U.S, I could not continue playing these sports as they simply do not hold an importance here. These examples are just a few of hundreds of cases. Although my experience isn’t as overwhelming as other stories due to support both emotionally and financially, it was still, however, one of the toughest challenges of my life. Everything that I was used to in Hong Kong was either nonexistent or completely different in the United States. With lots of hard work and dedication, it took me around two years to adapt, but still to this day there are certain things that I just don’t understand.

My life right now is very good and I cannot complain.  Even though I moved to North Carolina less than two years ago, I have finally managed to fit in and make lots of friends. Having experienced different cultures my entire life has shaped me as the person I am today.

When I look back at my undergraduate, I think of all the great memories and I shared with people who ended up becoming some of my closest friends. After college, I had a desire to study more, so I started to look around at different universities to pursue my Master’s degree. While looking around, I thought about studying abroad. Many of my friends had gone abroad for their further education and I was in the mood for a little adventure. Little did I know that in just a few weeks I would be sitting on a plane headed towards a country that would become huge part of my life.

The plane landed in Nova Scotia, a small province located on the eastern side of Canada. I remember walking out of the airport excited for what life had planned for me. I was shocked by the empty roads that stretched for miles and miles without connecting to another road. The first snowfall I saw was a sight to see. I watched as tiny snowflakes dancing around as they fell from the sky. For most people, learning the language can be the toughest part about moving to a new country, but for me it wasn’t. My parents had sent me to a private school in India where they also taught English. Having a strong vocabulary and good speaking skills, communication was never a problem. While in Nova Scotia, I stayed with a host family who treated me like their son and helped make my experience more memorable.

At the end of my first year this place became like home. I saw endless possibilities within this great country. After completing my second year, I started looking for jobs and found one in Ottawa, Canada. I went back to India and got married and brought my lovely wife to Canada. A couple of years later we were blessed with our first child, Rohan. Soon after, Tanya came into our lives.  After spending over 15 years in Canada, I moved with my family to the United States. So here I am, blessed to have a beautiful and supportive wife who is the proud mother of my two children. Every day I’m excited for what life holds for me and I know that Canada has played a huge part for why I am here today.

-Sharad Sachdev

Hun_s_Picture-16n2g74Hun-Yong Jo was originally from Seoul, South Korea. It wasn’t his decision to immigrate to America. The nine year old knew he was going to live in a different country, but at first it didn’t feel real to him. To the boy, it felt that he was going on a vacation. Hun said there were probably many reasons that why he moved, but as a young child, he didn’t know why he moved. Now in his mid- fifties, he thinks the reason behind his move was that Korea was a third world country at reconstruction period during that time period. The two most prominent changes for the young boy at first were language and home. Hun lived in a house in Korea but down-graded to an apartment in America restricting space for the boy to run around. Prior to coming to America, he did not learn any English. Even though Hun had many disadvantages, he did not have trouble making friends on the first day of school.

The clueless immigrant was enrolled as a 4^th grader at a public school in Detroit, Michigan. On the first day, a Caucasian boy was making fun of him. After school, Hun followed the boy and chased him down to his house to make a statement. Many of classmates from the school followed Hun as he kept chasing the boy. The boy was intimidated and was scared to come out of his house making Hun the hero of the day. His experience as an immigrant was abnormal, since he had no trouble socializing despite all the odds.

To him, Hun knew that his experience was unique since there was a low population of Asians, especially Koreans, in Michigan. In the 1970’s, life for an Asian was scary since there were lots of racial discrimination and oil crisis. Furthermore, people who commit hate crimes against Asians didn’t get penalized such was seen like in Vincent Chin’s case. Eventually, life for the all Asians got better as the decades went on. Over all, he gained more than lost more since Hun thinks that America has a potential for you to released your talents compared to such in Korea. Korea is a very strict and systematic place that makes it hard for people to grow and thrive in their talents. He said that “I brought the experience from Korea and built upon that in America since that is the ‘American Dream’”. Hun also said that “If I had stayed in Korean I would not be the same person but still would have survived”. His envision was that “America is what I built around me”.

Yee-lut Kwok was born in Hong Kong 1971.

Life was rough in Hong Kong, nobody could find jobs, there wasn’t enough food, the education system was virtually nonexistent, and everyone lived in constant fear of a Chinese invasion. In 1977 her mom went to visit family in Beijing they’d been separated from by the Chinese Civil war. There the streets were flooded with communist protestors because of the Cultural Revolution, this was so concerning that the same year she decided to move the family to America. Yee-lut was almost five when she left Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York.

In Brooklyn, she was packed into a one bedroom apartment with 11 family members and a mean street cat. Her dad work long hours as a cook in a Chinese restaurant leaving before she woke up and getting back after she’d gone to bed. Money was tight, food was hard to come by, and she was constantly bullied. Brooklyn wasn’t the sort of place they wanted to stay for the rest of their lives.

When she was nine years old, Yee-lut, her older brother, and her parents moved from Brooklyn to Durham, North Carolina. There, her dad found another job as a cook and her mom did data entry at an insurance company to get health insurance for her family since they couldn’t afford it otherwise. Brooklyn had been brimming with other non-English speaking immigrants so she’d only had to know Cantonese, however North Carolina was a vastly different situation. In the year it took her to learn English, her grades dropped significantly because she literally couldn’t understand the material.

Eleven years later she began studying chemistry at NC State, when she was a senior undergrad student she met research assistant Hao Hong. Three years after she’d graduated, Dr. Hong called and asked her if she wanted to help him start a business. Together the two of them founded Asymchem, a pharmaceutical company. Twenty years later, she’s the head of the US branch and the company recently went IPO in November 2016. She married Bernard Hsu in 1999 at which time she changed her name to Elut so people would be able to more easily pronounce it. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her family and three dogs and considers herself lucky to have been able to build a stable life in the US.

His name is Ethan. He is 15 years old and lives with his mom and dad in a comfortable two-story house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was born in the United States, took ESL, speaks perfect English and Chinese, and loves Chinese food. This is not your typical immigrant story.

Born in the town of Mountain View, California, Ethan was brought to his new home when he was only one year old. His family’s destination was a country on the other side of the globe: China. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Ethan’s parents had decided to make his home there because they wanted to ensure their son could know and speak the language of their ancestors, as well as the most populated country in the world. Ethan ended up attending elementary school in Dalian, making lots of friends in the process. Life was good in every way.

Then suddenly, around March of Ethan’s third grade year, his parents told him the big news. He was going to move back to the US. Sure enough, the summer before starting fourth grade, eight-year-old Ethan was back in his native country. Arriving in North Carolina, one of the first things he noticed was the number of people. The decrease in crowds compared to his home back in Dalian was staggering. He was pleasantly surprised, however, when he found his milieu very hospitable; sunny afternoons were often spent playing sports with the neighbors’ kids.

Not surprisingly, language was the biggest obstacle for Ethan. Upon starting fourth grade at Mills Park Elementary, he was pulled out of class three times a week for an ESL class. Fortunately, besides occasionally feeling slightly out of place, Ethan adapted quickly in this new world. He found ESL to be fun and made dozens of new friends at school. He even watched YouTube videos in an effort to improve his English. Soon, he became well-versed in the language, cultures, and customs of American society (though he still missed his friends in China – and the food – from time to time).

In hindsight, Ethan believes his parents made the right choice in bringing him back to the US. Now a successful rising sophomore at East Chapel Hill High School, he describes his experience as eye-opening and beneficial to maturity. When asked the question, “What do you love most about America?” Ethan merely smiles and responds, “The people.”

My dad’s lifelong journey began in the Ifededuna Tribe of Nigeria. Raised in a two-parent home as the 5th of 12 siblings, Innocent Modilim was supported by his dad’s work as a police officer and his moms work as a small business owner. As a child, he went to 4 different elementary schools due to his father needing to supervise several construction projects. Innocent was unable to attend the first part of secondary school due to two and a half years of civil war that wracked the country of Nigeria. After the war, Innocent finished his education and attended a seminary for 6 years before deciding priesthood wasn’t for him. Innocent worked for 7 years after leaving the seminary. He was an accounting clerk, an employee at a radio station, and a budget manager at a car repair shop. Wanting to go to college in America for a better education, he saved money for a flight to New Jersey, where he enrolled at Jersey City State College (now New Jersey City University). Seeing the U.S. for the first time was disappointing for him. He expected everything to be a lot cleaner and perfect; however, he stayed and graduated in 1989. He had a Bachelors, with a minor in Computer Science and a major in Math. After college, his first job was working in the computer department of a shipping company. Afterwards, he moved the North Carolina in 1992, where he lives now.

In NC, he worked at Nortel for 7 years before he was laid off due to company reconstruction. He then moved to SAS to work as a network specialist. It was 1998 when Innocent met his wife and my mother. They had 3 kids including me, and my dad worked 15 years at SAS before finally retiring.

In 1996, at the age of 19, Jannika, came to the United States. She always imagined traveling the world, so leaving her home country, Finland, wasn’t scary. As a world champion synchronized figure skater, she came to the US for international competitions as early as age 13. During one trip to the US, Jannika visited a top art school in New York and decided on a fresh start in America.

During college, Jannika made money working on campus because student visas do not allow for an off campus job. She realized she would have to find a company to sponsor her visa after graduation, as did the other 40% of the school’s international students. Graduates who can’t find a company to sponsor their visa are sent back to their home country, making finding a job very competitive.

Jannika did have her visa sponsored, but found changing jobs, the workload, and making more money difficult.  The company could discontinue her visa, send her back to Finland, and she’d lose the life she had built in America. She worked an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of hours to the point where she was getting physically sick. But in this situation, there was nothing she could do.

Jannika applied for a green card knowing it is a long and complicated process. The easiest way to get a green card was by marriage, but she wasn’t ready and hadn’t met anyone she felt strongly about marrying. She started the green card application, but was told it would cost at least $10,000. The way she was working, that didn’t look possible, but she also didn’t have a choice. She started putting money aside.

Soon after, she met her future wife, Emily. Once gay marriage became legal, she proposed to Emily. They got married 3 days later to quicken the process of her green card.

Jannika and Emily moved to Durham and now own a house with a vegetable garden, have two dogs, and Jannika has started a competitive synchronized skating program of her own in the US, Triangle Formation Synchronized Skating. After 10 years of living in the US, she still waits for her green card. If she never met Emily, Jannika says she “would be in the hospital due to the terrible working conditions.”

She worked hard to live in the United States, but the United Stated and I are lucky to have her!