Golden Blood--Cause and Effect Essay

Golden Blood

In China, the nick name “Old Golden Hill” is more popular than its master San Francisco, California. In the mid-nineteenth century, because of its gold ore, San Francisco became famous around the world. Therefore, the Chinese people who had experienced the Second World War and the Chinese Civil War were looking for a new and peaceful place to rebuild their lives, and no doubt that a place with gold could draw their attention. My hometown, XinHui, is a place very close to Hong Kong and far away from Beijing. The geographical advantage makes immigration be possible. People stretched out their necks to find a way to move to San Francisco. Their blood was filled with golden dreams, and my family inherited this twinkling blood. Inevitably, this blood lit up my family’s economy, changed our world views and drove us to be immigrants. 

When the first batch of immigrants left our village, the economy was first affected by the decreasing population. Even in new China, farmland was still the main property. Every village has its own farmland, and the area of farmland never changed. As a result, each villager could get a certain amount of farmland based on the village’s population. When immigrants left the village, they gave up their right to hold a piece of land. Fortunately or unfortunately, my whole family had no method of leaving our village, so we got more and more farmland during the immigration wave. In addition, the immigrants who had found their golden dreams in the United States would remit money to their families. Thus, people would buy our crops from the extra farmland. Our standard of living began improving, and that signified that our lives would have a change.

Immigrants brought us not only the money, but also new information about the world. This strange information was helping my family set up a new world view. We often heard the news about foreign countries, and our topics of discussion move away from the land. When the first postcard from the United States was opened, our village was boiling. The buildings looked odd because they didn’t look like our one-story houses. As more and more letters and postcards arrived from the new world, we learned more about the strange customs of the world. This enabled my family to get in touch with the modern world.

We don’t need to dream of immigration anymore because right now we are living in Chicago, the third largest city in the United States. I’m pretty sure that my family didn’t have any ability to leave before my aunt met her husband. My uncle is Chinese American, and his family moved to the United State long before he was born. Because of the arranged marriage, my aunt became a U.S. citizen a few years after her marriage. Then, thanks to their help, my family got a chance to apply for our golden dream. A long time waiting and my aunt’s credit in the United States became our airline tickets from China to Chicago. My family started to dream about other things.

It is very hard to imagine the status of my family if we are still living in China. It may be a picture about a farmer who is working on a narrow piece of farmland. It may be a picture about a group of people that are talking about their crops. It may be a picture of Chinese traditional wedding. Either way, the backgrounds are always the one-story houses. The immigration wave gave my family a brush to print a different picture about our lives.