“First Week in America, September 1991,” centers around immigrant experiences in the 1990s, and aims to tackle themes of cultural assimilation, migration, and synthesis. Through this piece, I aim to revisit and celebrate my mother’s first moments in this country.

Central to this work is my personal realization that as I prepare for graduation, I have entered a stage in my life that closely parallels with my parents’ experiences immigrating to the United States. At 23, my mother immigrated from Shanghai, China -a booming metropolitan exploding with growth at the end of the millennium- to Oklahoma City, an extraordinarily rural and altogether unfamiliar world. Through this work, I am navigating the fears, hopes, and emotions of this lifechanging period, while also attempting to understand what this pivotal experience would have felt like firsthand.