A ONE-WAY TICKET FROM MYANMAR TO THE U.S. Now, Chu Paing is a PhD student at CU Boulder Growing up in Myanmar, Chu Paing remembers looking forward to school everyday because she enjoyed socializing with friends. Paing, who is now a doctoral student in anthropology at CU Boulder, says: “No wonder now I am pursuing a career that is related to school. I just want to be in school forever!” Paing grew up in a single-mother household with a large age gap from her elder two sisters, who were 14 years and 11 years older than her. After her sisters married and moved away from Yangon, the city they were from in Myanmar, it was just Paing and her mother. Unexpectedly, on the evening of September 7, 2012, seven days after celebrating her 20th birthday, Paing left Yangon. Not for a nearby town, but to move to the U.S. With a one-way ticket, she did not know when she would be back. She recalls: “I brought two suitcases and one carry-on filled with stuff my mom made sure I wouldn’t need to buy for almost a year—from needles and threads and an iron all the way to shampoo bottles and almost a year-worth of sanitary pads—all of which I later found I could buy in the US!” “But there I was, all prepared to make this life-changing journey across the world.” The Big Decision to Move to NYC What led up to this big move? On a whim, Paing had applied for the Diversity Visa lottery in Myanmar, one night at an internet cafe. She told her mother and both of them did not think anything of it. When they found out, Paing had been selected, there were mixed feelings at first. After making the decision that Paing should go to the US, her mom dug up an old phone book and found a number for an old friend owho had left for the US and was now living in New York City. Paing says: “So, she decided that I should go to NYC, just in case I needed help with finding a job or anything else.”
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July 2020 | Spotlight
“As a young teenager, all I knew about the US was big, tall buildings and fancy business people. We had no idea there were suburbs or other places outside of NYC or LA.” It turned out that her mom’s friend was running a hostel in NYC and promised to secure a room for Paing and pick her up at the airport when she arrived. “When I landed at the JFK airport and came through the immigration, I didn’t see my mom’s friend. I attempted to call her at one of the public phones, but kept getting error messages that this number did not exist. Finally, a janitorial staff helped me call the number. And that was when I found out that I had to put +1 before US numbers!” Life in NYC Initially, the transition to NYC was not too much of a culture shock. Paing recalls the weather being familiar and similar to Yangon’s in September. She acquired different jobs before going to college. “One of my first job interviews was for a cashier position at a Vietnamese takeout place near Times Square. My then-boss, who herself was an immigrant from Vietnam, offered me a floor-cleaning position instead.” “She claimed that I had ‘a very strong accent’ and that customers would not understand me as a cashier. What was worse was that I later found out that she took advantage of my naivety by only offering $4 per hour, half of a legal minimum wage in NYC. She told me not to discuss this with other employees.” Paing only ended up working there for
a week but it is an experience that has stayed with her. “That encounter with linguistic discrimination—from a fellow immigrant— was the driven force behind my decision to pursue a degree in language teaching and later linguistics when I had the chance to go to college.” Paing enrolled at LaGuardia Community College in Queens with an interest in sociocultural linguistics. She came to understand how language
Paing became a U.S. citizen on January 30, 2020, a day before the Trump administration announced the travel ban, which now includes Myanmar.
By Annie Guo VanDan
During the quarantine, Paing enjoys readin was important not only as a communicative tool but also how certain languages influenced perceptions about people in society. “Why do we find the French language and British accents romantic but let’s say not Spanish, a language highly associated with Mexico in the context of the US? And why is a group of ethnic minority populations like Rohingya in my home country Myanmar being persecuted for not
