We met for the last time on Monday, November 28. I would have liked to meet with her a few more times before the semester ended, but she was flying back home to Korea on the thirtieth and was not coming back until early January. For our last meeting we talked more about both her life in the United States and her life back home.
She first began to tell me that she was transferring to TCC next semester. She has been busy registering over there and getting ready to attend classes in the spring. She wants to go there since it is cheaper than TCU and hopes to take culinary classes for fun next semester; however, she did mention that she had trouble for registering for classes because they only allow you to take classes for your major. She also couldn’t take any classes that she had previously taken, so she had a very select group of classes that she could choose from since she already took so many classes previously. She said that she had taken some very large amount of classes back in Chicago, I do not remember the exact number, including like six science classes. I was curious why she keeps taking classes here, when she already has a degree, owns a company, and seems to be pretty well off. She explained to me that she has to take classes in order to maintain her student visa so she can live in the United States with her daughter. She said that she explored other alternatives such as moving her company here, but the student visa was the most practical. If she moved her company, she would have to both make a two million dollar investment and hire ten full time employees for her company over here. So, she decided that she is just going to keep taking classes and get a culinary degree for fun. It surprised me to learn that she was forced to take classes in order to live here. I never would have realized that it was this difficult to live in the United States at this day and age.
Jeanny runs two businesses back home. She has some sort of recycling company that she has a group of employees run from Korea. She says that she just stays in touch with the company via phone and computer, and she does not constantly work on it every day. The other business that she runs deals with buying, selling, and renting real estate. She thought about making a real estate business over here, but the fact that she needed to hire an entire office deterred her.
I then asked if she was excited about her upcoming trip back home. She had mixed feelings; she was excited to see everyone, but she also was going to miss spending the holidays with her daughter. She joked that she didn’t know what her brother and daughter were going to do for meals when she is gone. She said that they will probably just be eating out every night, which is not good. All joking aside, she said that she knows they will be fine without her.
From here we said our goodbyes, but we both wanted to keep in touch. Hopefully, we will be able to meet sometime next semester to check in on how each other is doing. Looking back, I thoroughly enjoyed all of my visits with Jeanny and was glad I had the chance to meet her. I hope that she took away as much away from these meetings as I did throughout the entire semester. These meetings truly helped me understand things in a different perspective.
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