DEPARTED FROM
Hyderabad, India
ARRIVED IN
San Francisco, California
YEAR
2014
AGE
15
NOW LIVES IN
Seattle, Washington
TRANSCRIPT
TRANSCRIBED BY Neil Bhagat (x 3)
Ever since I was nine years old, my dad went to the US for the first time and came back with all these like cars and things for me. I’m like “Damn I want to go there.” So I told him from the age of like 10 to 14 that I want to go to the US. And I was doing totally okay, fine. My family’s doing okay; they didn’t want to move. They’re like “Okay for you, Sanchit, we’ll move.” On the flight I was like “Did I make a big mistake?” Because I was doing totally fine in India. My classes were great, I had good friends, good family. “This is a big mistake,” that’s what I thought. But I sunk the feeling in and never told my parents that I felt that way. I felt like I wish I could take a flight back halfway through because it’s a big change, right? I was gonna start 10th grade giving up all my friends and everything.
I landed and then it said “Welcome to San Francisco.” I was like nervous, so nervous. And then I waited for my taxi for 20 minutes. Didn’t arrive. So a kind gentleman said “Let me find you a taxi.” So he’d stopped a taxi for us. We’re like “Oh, he’s really nice!” Got to the cab, got to the hotel. They charge us 200 bucks [laughs]. Okay, we pay him 200. And then he’s like “Tip?” Because tipping in India… you don’t really tip people because it’s included in their salary. Sure okay, we tipped him like 2 dollars [laughs]. He’s like, ”A little more.” So we gave him like 20 bucks. We were like “Shit. That’s a lot of money.” Went to our hotel, and then went to a corner and the three of us, me and my mom and my dad, we hugged each other and stayed there for like a couple minutes. Like we made it, you know. I’ll always remember that.
