My Autobiography

My family comes from the Dominican Republic, we are Santiagueros with my mom being from San Jose and my dad from Villa Gonzales. But other than being from the Dominican Republic my family isn’t sure of any further ancestry, the only thing I can tell you is that my mother comes from Taino descent and my father’s grandfather was a (possibly Jewish) white man with blue eyes, (you may do as you wish with that information). In 1995 my father decided it would be time to pick up and move to the states, it definitely wasn’t a decision he made on a whim but it was necessary. Slowly but surely the rest of my family began immigrating as well, it started with my oldest sister in 1999, my mother and two other sisters in 2001 and lastly, my brother’s visa was approved in 2002. You might think “how exactly does this fit into your autobiography”? Well if it weren’t for this sequence of events who knows if I’d be here today.

Three years after my mom came to the states I was born. It was the 26th of August in the year 2004, obviously, I don’t remember the moment I came out of my mother’s tummy, but I do know I was born at approximately 10:34 am by emergency c-section at Lincoln hospital in the Bronx. I can also tell you about how absolutely incompetent the workers there were. Shortly after my birth, the doctors made my still very sedated mother sign a paper essentially handing me off for adoption. Luckily their plan of putting a 10.3-pound newborn baby up for adoption was unsuccessful. If it weren’t for my father and oldest sister my life would be a completely different story. 

For the first 9 years and 10 months of my life, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx. My household consisted of my parents and my sister who is 4 yrs older than me, by this time my older siblings had already moved out and started families. A year after moving into my new home my family received devastating news about my father. In 2016 we were told that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia, it is a progressive disease that begins with mild memory loss. This diagnosis is the scariest news my family has ever received. At first, I was in denial, I thought that if I ignored it and shoved it down my fears of losing my dad would go away. Unfortunately, that fear becomes more real every day. Although I won’t be losing him physically, every single thing that makes him who he is will eventually be stripped away. I won’t say that growing up with him as a father was easy, but I still don’t know what I’ll do when his time comes. 

In 2018 when I was 14 years old, I started high school. It wasn’t too hard of an adjustment because I had a group of friends from my previous school. Everything went decently in my freshman year, next thing I know the year has ended, and here comes sophomore year, Covid hits and it causes everyone to go into quarantine. Now I know what you’re probably thinking: “Hilary is about to go into depth about how Covid messed up her life”, but actually this isn’t the case. Don’t get me wrong, Covid definitely caused me lots of setbacks and months of depression, but it taught me lots of lessons I wouldn’t have been able to learn otherwise. I was finally able to see that my 4 year long friendships from middle school weren’t doing anything but holding me back. I had grown so much in all that time and they hadn’t. Keeping them in my life would just cause more unnecessary pain and drama than I did not ask for. 

During this time I also learned that beauty comes from self-confidence. I used to be the most insecure person I knew, but now I can say that I am one of the most confident people I know. If my 11-year-old self could see me today she would be beyond proud of us, all of those endless nights where she would cry about her self-image have ended. I finally learned to take care of myself in ways that no one else could or even would.

I know my life hasn’t been the hardest and it also hasn’t been the most glamorous,  but I’ve already lived long enough to know that time can heal even the largest wounds. All of my life experiences have shaped me into the strong and independent woman I am now. Today I live my life to the fullest because I don’t give those wounds the opportunity to reopen.

What resonates with me from, Mother Tongue by, Amy Tan

Being a Bi-lingual woman born to immigrant parents living in the US creates a huge similarity between me and the author. Tan speaks about how a lot of the time when speaking with people such as her stockbroker, or a doctor at a hospital her mother struggles a lot with the language barrier. Not so much because they can’t understand her but more because of the inconvenience it causes them. But because of this Tan is forced to imitate her mother on the phone and maybe even translate what the other person is saying just so that she can be taken seriously by the American people. I am someone who has also found herself doing these tasks for one or even both of my parents. Growing up and still to this day, whenever an important piece of mail came in my father would yell from the other room and say “Hilary come read this paper for me” with these words he didn’t JUST mean read it, he also meant translate it. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, even back when I myself didn’t even know what half of those words meant. Although my situation is a little bit different because neither one of my parents speak any English, this is a struggle my family and I have also had to face. It saddens me to see that many people are treated differently, as though they either don’t speak English at all or speak broken English when 9 times out of 10 these people weren’t given the opportunity to do better.

Another moment that resonated with me was when Tan talks about how English was never her strong suit in school and that even her former boss said that writing was her worst skill and that she should hone her talents toward account management. Personally, I never had this issue because I learned to speak fluent English before the age of 5 but I know a lot of bi-lingual speakers that struggled with grammar while writing and just speaking English in general growing up because of the certain adjustments that come with learning a new language.