and a body to remember

I'm absolutely loving Carmen Rodriguez' book. I feel as if she's telling my story. I want to give this to my mom after i'm finished reading it, because Estela is so much like my mom. I felt like reading or finding a deleted file in my hard drive, or memory card. I call the first few years after immigration the dark ages, and I had completely erased those years from my history. So reading this book was like finding old baby pictures or recordings in a box hidden in the basement. What's cool about it is that it's not just any kind of immigration. It's immigration to Vancouver, Canada in August the same month that I arrived, the same age as Estela's older daughter. We both fled out country because of political issues back at home. It was so funny to read how Estela imagined Canada looking at National Geographic pictures. I used to know that Canada has greezly bears and that the  Niagara falls, the biggest fall in the world is in Canada through a board game i had, so the image of the fall and bears kept coming in my head. 

My mother found work first and had a higher salary than my dad which was very weird at first.  My parent's relationship has changed ever since then, and my mother has a lot more to say when it comes to family decision making. One thing I've noticed about immigrant women who used to be oppressed in their home company, is that they become superwomen when they move to countries with more freedom and opportunities, because they really appreciate all the freedom they get. They study and work really hard. I could really relate to the little girls, because I felt very odd having black hair in junior high, in west vancouver. It might've been different if I had gone to high school in another neighborhood. It made me laugh how the family found certain things strange when they moved here, like electrical stoves, the smell of french fries and hamburger everywhere... 

It took me years to get used to the taste of food here, everything was so tasteless, the fruits tasted like water, and the meat and the rice was so strange. I used to think that the food was tasteless because it was made on an electrical stove! I hated Canada so much. As I turned 16 my life changed a lot and I found myself and my identity, and now I don't think that Canada is the best country one could live in. Thank you Jon for familiarizing us with cool books :)