From a Visit to a Life Long Career

by Yujung Hu

You arrived in a foreign country to study just a few months ago. You realized that the English you have learned since middle school was only good for reading and writing but not very helpful in making any real life conversations. You were so afraid of talking to anybody but you were desperate to find a way to improve the situation. What would you do? For me, I went to the West Lafayette Public Library in Indiana.

It was a fall afternoon in 1993. I stepped out of my graduate student dormitory at Purdue University with a map in hand and walked about half a mile to the library which at that time was an ordinary one-story building. The library was pleasantly quiet and only a few people were there. I did not have the courage to talk to the librarian even though the librarian looked friendly enough. After browsing through the shelves for a while, I finally stopped at the Children’s section. I chose a few fiction books which contained a great amount of dialogue. Then I applied for the library card and checked the books out. 

Every day when I was tired of studying my course assignments, I took out the public library books and studied the dialogues in them but my attention always shifted to the story itself. When I finished them I immediately walked to the library again and checked out more books. Of course Purdue University had great libraries too but for me they did not serve the same purpose as the West Lafayette Public Library. The walk to the library was a treat for me because it let me feel I was an ordinary resident who leisurely visited a local library and the feeling of being a foreign student who stayed on campus 24 hours a day temporarily disappeared.

The idea of reading children’s fiction and hoping to improve my English might sound silly but it increased my confidence when I spoke and planted the seed of my love for the library forever. Now sixteen years later I am no longer a foreign student but a U.S. citizen living in Minnesota. I still visit libraries frequently with my kid. A few years ago, I was contemplating changing my career and library science immediately came to mind. Now I am on the way to getting my Library and Information Science master’s degree. I hope that one day when I work at the library no new immigrants or foreign students will be afraid to talk to me as I was when I first stepped into the library.