My Story

                                                                                                HyongMee HongHi, my name is Hyongmee Hong from Korea. I have been here for two years and I live in Federal way. I am married and I have two children. My husband is working for small company. My son is fourteen and my daughter is thirteen.  They have adjusted well here but still they have many problems in English. I have experienced many things here, which I have never had in my country. Most of them are not good experiences to me but I'm trying to enjoy them. Frankly to live here without English is not easy to me. So sometimes I'd like to go back to my country where I speak everything that I want to say and I can meet everyone who I really want to see.

  The biggest problem to me here is I can't speak with my children's teachers about my children. I tried several times but I couldn't make it and I got stress more. So sometimes I write a letter with my poor English to say what my children need or let my children do it instead of me.

  Fortunately, I live in Federal way where many Koreans gather. There are many Korean markets, churches, hospitals, schools and even fortunetellers. So I don't need to speak English and I feel comfortable to stay here. And I became to know that too many Korean people are living here without English. I could imagine my future in my mind. It was so terrible a picture.

I know I am not good at language even my own language, English is especially too difficult to me, because it has opposite order in sentence compared with my language and the pronunciation is too difficult. But I know I have to try to learn English for my future picture. That reason made me to take this class and now I’m really enjoying this class, because I have never thought about writing something with a computer. And I want to learn more about computer. After taking a test, I wanted to take ESL class but there was no seat anymore. I was late. I was so disappointed. But the man who was working for ESL students recommended me to take this computer class and the pronunciation class.

Anyway I hesitated to take this class because I don’t know anything about the computer and I felt even scared. But now I thought I’m lucky and the choice was really good for me. If I gave up this class at that time, it would take long time to try to learn about the computer again.