Cultural Personal Essay Contest: Angelika Bourke Takes First for Hamilton High School

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The submission below is the winning Hamilton High School essay from the 2024 Cultural Personal Essay Contest, sponsored by the Hamilton Heritage Club.

Angelika Bourke

I didn’t know the way I grew up was different from everyone else until I went to school.

Growing up, my mom made sure to only speak Polish when my dad was at work. Being from Poland, my mom wanted to make sure that we learned the language, her first language. 

It was where she was from, and she was proud of it. 

I thought it was normal for kids to know two different languages; we were never taught any different.

 When we lived in California, my Saturday mornings would be spent sitting at the dining room table reading from children’s books in Polish. Neither my brother nor I were any good, but that didn’t stop my mom from trying.

When I started Kindergarten in California, I still thought nothing of it. We had moved to a small city in the middle of nowhere, and I had friends of all different heritages who spoke many different languages. I went to a private school. We all wore the same uniform. We all learned the same things. I didn’t think anything different. It was second nature for me to understand and communicate with my mom in her language, and I never saw it as something different.

My view altered when we moved to New York.

I was around 8 and we had just gotten settled into our new house and into the rhythm of a new school year. It was still a private school, but I had to make new friends and meet new teachers, both things I didn’t like because I was already a shy person. But this also made me more observant.

When we went to the store, I began to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. People would ask my mom, “Where are you from?” or would outright guess where she was from based on her accent. I had never thought about the fact that my mom had an accent, but listening to people ask made me stop and listen to her English, which, being her second language, obviously wasn’t as flawless and clear. My new friends had also taken notice, asking where my mom was from, and when I responded saying she was from Poland, they would reply, “Cool! Do you know any Polish?” I would always reply of course, since my grandparents don’t know any and therefore that was my only way of communicating with them, and they would think it was the coolest thing ever. I shrugged it off though I was flattered and prideful; it had taken years of practice and I loved the idea of being good at something that others didn’t know how to do. It made me feel unique. I thought it was cool that my mom was from somewhere else and that everyone else felt the same way.

My view changed completely when I moved to Nebraska.

I was in 5th grade, about to end my year and head off to middle school. Some girls were talking about immigration and had asked me if my mom was an immigrant because they could tell she had an accent, to which I had responded yes and that she had her citizenship. One of the girls scoffed, saying that my mom shouldn’t be here and to go back to where she came from. I was speechless. Why would someone say that? I didn’t understand how someone couldn’t like someone based on where they came from. My mom had worked just as hard as anyone else to come here. 

I learned many things that day, one being that many people aren’t as open-minded and accepting as I had previously thought. Some people are judgemental, but many are just uninformed. I never faulted the girl that day; she may have been raised in a family that didn’t teach her the importance of inclusion.

But it changed me.

I promised myself to be educated. I promised myself to stand up to people who refuse to be open-minded and inclusive. I promised myself to respectfully learn and befriend people from all walks of life because, in the end, aren’t we all humans?