Our American Home, Our New Family

      The four of us, Zhang Yongling, Yi Ming,Deng Yingzi and I, have found a new home for us in New Haven, Connecticut, USA and we have become the family members of it. We get along quite well and have a harmonious relationship between us.

    Since we four came to New Haven, we have stayed together, go to class together or join study breaks together, have lunch together outside in a restaurant  and make and have breakfast and dinner together and go shopping together, make decisions together on what food to buy, discuss together and worry together about our colleagues' personal security, share our things with each other, settle accounts together and solve our problems, 

 first in the Courtyard Hotel, then in the new home in Mansfield Street.

    We moved into the current temporary home after much mental struggle, but now we are quite happy with this ne home of ours, and happy to stay together. The new home is not far away from the campus, we eat our lunch just outside the teaching buildings.

    The new home is surrounded by beautiful villas with a street in front, from two bedroom windows, we could see trees and meadows and the street, which makes one feel envigorated and energetic, though the other rooms don't have much to recommend, epecially the sitting-room in which I sleep at night. There is no door between the dining-room and the sitting-room, nor between the sitting-room and the corridor. The result is that any noise produced by walking in the night or early in the morning would give me a start, or any loud talking would make it hard for me to fall asleep. But exhaustion brought on by shopping and walking to and back from school plus walking after dinner makes me fall asleep soon each night. I sleep better even than when I was in my own home in China.

    I had volunteered to sleep in the sitting room while back in China, with no idea that it has no door at all, nor a good view of the trees and meadows and other houses. But sometimes I could see a small animal with a long tail moving or standing at the top of the roof. Funny, isn't it.

    The community is quiet most of the time and the pedestrian walks on both sides of the street are clean and cemented, the weather has become much nicer since we moved in on July 2nd. It is hot in the daytime, but we stayed in the classroom in the daytime, and it is cool in the nighttime. All of us can sleep well despite our colleauges' complaint several days ago that it was too hot in the bedroom for them to fall asleep.  

    We know the reason why our house is cool at night. Our house is mde up of wood, and in addition it has a layer of wooden covering to protect against the heat getting absorbed.

    The community is very clean, because each day some black men will come to pick up trash and get rid of the fallen tree leaves with a battery-powered gadget.

     The neighbors living downstairs are quiet most of the time and they are invisible most of the time, too. I did not know it was a couple who are living on the second floor until one morning when I did some cleaning on the ground floor. The couple went out together and the man said “hello” to me.

Today, when three of us were waiting in the ground floor balcony for Doctor Zhang to come back to open the door, We saw the old lady driving back home. She said “Hello” to us and we smiled back to her.

We also saw a young man entering the house. Perhaps he is the Japanese that Albert, a friend of the subletter by the name of Hannah Sasoon, mentioned the day we came here on july the first. He did not greet us. But that does not matter. 

    We four came to love our new home and enjoy each other's company.