The woman shut the door.  She quickly shuffled around the front of the vehicle and climbed into the driver’s seat.  She slammed the door and proceeded to start the van.  The smell was different; I did not recognize them, but there were scents of daisy and vanilla coming from the two women.  I sat perfectly still, knowing nothing and not wanting to cause trouble or attract attention.   There was a long cloth that was covering my waist.  It stretched at a forty-five degree angle and then wrapped itself around my shoulders.  I felt its tight grip, keeping me from escaping.  As the vehicle began to move, I looked back and realized that I was leaving my home forever.

My home appeared empty, lonely.  The children and adults were standing outside.  The younger children were sitting stationary, remaining where the caretaker had set them down.  The women wore sad faces, their clothes were dirty, and they all held babies in their arms.  All the children had melancholy expressions, and one child stood with envy on his face.  They all had their funeral faces on that day, like someone kin to them had died and they were mourning their death.  We turned a corner and the building disappeared.  My past left behind me.

We had traveled for some time.  I stared at the road outside the window.  When I lifted my head I saw long fields of rice.  I would see someone picking rice, and like a fleeting moment in time, they would disappear, out of my sight.  I noticed the van’s movement toward the side of the road, swaying toward the field and then slowly moving back to the center of the road like a pendulum. I began to feel something inside of me, like a worm, a creature, stirring inside my stomach; it may have been caused by the pendulum-like movement of the van.  I repressed this feeling with a swallow of breath. “Gulp”. The bumps of the road were felt in my stomach.  They were the fists that hit and stirred me.  I felt it crawling up my throat bringing the inside of my stomach with it.  I tasted rice and the acid creature who lived in it.  Before, I could take a breath to repress the creature.  But now it was inevitable.  Like The Styx flowing from Hades down a mountain cliff it came pouring out of my mouth.  I lunged forward. I heard the lady scream. She said something to the other woman in their language but included my name.  We slowed down.  I felt my head become light, my eyes half closed; I saw nothing but faded grayish-white.  I tilted my head back and went to sleep.

I woke up with a fresh smell of soap and had on new cloths that were not mine.  We were in a room.  There were two beds with very soft, comforting pillows.  I noticed the older lady sitting beside my bed.   Her hair was grayish-brown and it was puffy in a mass of circles on top of her head. She wore a convincing smile that told me she was friendly.  Even though she did not speak very much Vietnamese and had to use her phrase book a lot, she explained to me what was happening and why I was being taken away from my home.  Her name was Ba Joyce.

We boarded a large plane and arrived in a large city.  I was not very frightened because I had Ba Joyce.  She had told me of the family I would be living with.  While we were departing the plane, she got out a magazine and pointed to a picture of a man and his wife eating dinner outside a restaurant.  Her fingers traced the invisible line to the man’s head and said, “Dad”, and then they ran to the woman, “Mom”.  I looked up and saw her glowing smile.

We found them sitting in a group, snuggled up.  The two children were sleeping, one in the chair, the other in the man’s lap.  The man and woman were alert, searching for the familiar, glowing smile of Ba Joyce.  They found it.  The woman leaped up and woke up the children.  The man picked up the child in his lap and followed the destination the woman was running toward.  Their names were the Jenkins, and so is mine, now.
My name is Micah Luan Jenkins.  I was adopted September 1, 1994.  I was nine years old at the time.  My life took a pivotal turn and it has shaped the person I am today.  I have had to overcome the language, live with new and unfamiliar people and places and leaving the home I had always known.  The college experience will be similar to the one I have had.  I probably will not have to learn a new language, but I will meet new people, and it’s a different place.  There will be very difficult challenges and obstacles that I may have to overcome, but I know if I can overcome living in one place and situation one day, and the next year with a different family and different place, I can overcome the obstacles that I meet in college.