Goodbye, Myung!

編按：寫完了Myung的文章以後，發現我竟然沒有機會跟Myung分享這些感受，所以決定把它寫成英文，一方面也當作自己的練習（當然嘍！這是有請tutor幫我改過的啦！）。
I really like Los Alamos, but there is one thing which I don’t like. A lot of my friends or classmates come to Los Alamos with their husbands; most of their husbands are post-doctorial researchers or exchange visitors. Usually, researchers spend one to three years in Los Alamos, and then they leave. Making friends in Los Alamos makes me have to tolerate the sadness I feel when my friends have to leave.

Myung is my first Korean friend. We met each other in the ESL class of the University of New Mexico last September. As soon as we knew each other, I learned that she and her husband planned to leave Los Alamos in March, 2008. Although I knew when she was going to leave, it didn’t lessen my sadness when she finally left. Myung and I became acquainted because she taught me how to make sushi. Sushi is one kind of traditional Korean and Japanese food. Myung is really good at making sushi. Every morning, she made sushi for her little son as his lunch. Sometimes she brought some sushi to share with all her classmates. We really loved her sushi, and she invited us to learn how to make it at her apartment. That was our first time to hold an “international” party. All our classmates are from different countries, so we named this kind of party “international”. After that, we started to hold irregularly scheduled little parties at different classmates’ homes. We had a lot of fun and got more chances to practice speaking English at our parties than in the classes. Sometimes, we made food and had lunch together; sometimes we just had a tea time and shared desserts made ourselves.

I still remember one time when Myung taught us how to make kimchi which is a traditional spicy Korean food, and we ate fried rice noodles at my apartment. We always had a lot of topics we could talk about. Sometimes we talked about the different cultures in our countries; sometimes we discussed the personalities and habits of our husbands. We even talked about the love stories of how we met our husbands. We really created a lot of interesting memories at these parties. All these parties were started by the first gathering at Myung’s apartment, so I think we should give credit to her for having those interesting parties. Myung is the pioneer of our “international” party.

Myung was 46 years old when we met. If we had met each other in different circumstances, I might have needed to call her auntie. However, we met in our ESL classroom as classmates. She looked so young that I had never ever noticed that she was 46 years old. I always considered her age to be in her early thirties. I still remember I felt so surprised when she told me that her son was studying in college. I set Myung as my model because she worked so hard and lived her life in a very abstinent way. She had gone to almost every class and watched English television programs for at least three hours everyday to learn English. While she was watching TV programs, she wrote down all the vocabulary words she learned from the TV programs. In addition, she spent one hour everyday reading English books which she bought on the internet. She loved to exercise and walked everywhere. Sometimes I wanted to give her a ride, but she always said she wanted to walk home. I think exercise is the secret of making her look so young.

What a pity that Myung has left. We held a party to say goodbye to her and gave her a little notebook filled with all of our blessings. Goodbye, Myung! I will miss you.