教師專業碩士◆英文題庫下載題庫

Do the right thing: A text about a Korean girl, Kim Su-Jung, who went to live in the USA. 

I moved from Korea to the USA when I was 14 years old. The first few weeks were great—everything was exciting and different. Going to the supermarkets was an adventure: the foods were all new to me and everything was so big!  

The biggest culture shock for me was going to high school. First of all, I looked different. All the other girls looked so much older than me. They wore make-up and colored their hair. And I never went to a school with boys before.  

So the first thing I did to try to fit in was have a perm. I also started wearing make-up, but I wasn’t very good at putting it on. My eyeliner always seemed to smudge and my lipstick was always the wrong color. I loved nail polish though. I used to wear different colors on each finger. I also got my ears pierced.  

I found Americans a lot more open than Koreans. When I ate my dinner in the cafeteria, I always tried to ignore the boys and girls kissing each other over the table. People don’t do that in Korea. I found it hard to eat my dinner! The other thing I found hard was holding hands (or not holding hands). In Korea girls hold hands with girls, but in America people think that’s really weird. Instead girls hold hands with their boyfriends. I thought that was really weird! I wasn’t cool either. In Korea it’s good to be clever and do well at school, but in America I was a nerd for liking to study (and I wore glasses, which made it worse). 

I found making friends really hard. My English wasn’t great, which made me shy to speak, but also I didn’t understand the rules of conversation. When people made me compliments like ‘that’s a nice sweater’, I said ‘thanks’, but I didn’t know what to say next. I didn’t understand that they were just trying to start a conversation with me. So, I didn’t have many friends at school.