The Sandwich
My First Day in America, 36 Years Ago
Thirty-six years ago today, January 11th, 1989, I stepped on American soil for the very first time. In the 23 years of my life before that day, I had only lived in one house, traveled less than half a dozen times within the border of China, and never traveled alone. Little did I know about America, and certainly nothing about the “American Dream”.
The original version of the story was my very first published essay, by
and her Substack newsletter Memoir Land, on August 18, 2022. This is an edited version of the original essay.
I pushed open the heavy double door and stepped out of Selleck Quadrangle, the graduate housing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The frigid January air entered my nostrils and instantly froze the hair inside—what a strange sensation!
The cold air cleared my head. The past 48 hours had been a blur. It was impossible to fit hours into days since I boarded the flight at Shanghai Hong Qiao airport1, my first international trip and one of the 5 times I ever left home. I felt like I was going through one strangely long day. Time zone was a concept I had yet to wrap my head around. China covers approximately the same longitude degrees as the United States, but it had (and still has) just a single time zone, the Beijing Standard Time. The long hours in the air were met with nerve-wracking chaos in San Francisco’s SFO and Denver’s mile-high DEN airports: Immigration, customs, and transfer buses between terminals. When I finally arrived at Lincoln’s LNK airport, my flight was the only arrival at the only terminal of the airport. The quietness was comforting.
Outside the terminal, it was already dark. I was greeted by my piano Professor, Mr. Ravnan, and his cellist daughter Kari. Those were the times when you could greet your guests at the terminal, an unthinkable act today. They drove me to my assigned dorm, the Selleck Quadrangle, and we said good night at the entrance.
The RA (resident assistant) was a fast-spoken girl who had already changed into her comfortable pajamas. Handing me a blanket and bed sheet, she gave me a quick welcome tour of the laundry room, the common area, and the shared bathroom at the end of the hall. We got to my assigned room at last.
“Oh, by the way,” she turned just before exiting the room. “The cafeteria is closed until classes start, one week from today.”
She smiled, and disappeared behind the door. I was too tired to register the implication of that matter-of-fact statement and went straight to bed, with the rolled-up coat functioning as a pillow.
Twelve hours later, I woke up to a growling stomach. I could not remember when I last ate, what I vaguely remembered was something about the cafeteria not opening until a week later.
So, the first task to be completed on my first official day in the United States, was to find myself something to eat in this city that would become my new home. I intended to treat myself with a proper meal to mark this milestone.
Despite growing up in a big city, I was (and still am) horrible with directions. Any destination that required more than a few turns would never fail to confuse me on the return route. Lucky for me, all the schools I ever attended up to that point, were located within a one-mile radius from my Shanghai home and required no more than two turns. Now seven thousand miles away and an unimaginable number of turns later, I was not going to get lost on my first day in Lincoln, a city roughly 1/20th the size of Shanghai, with less than 1/100th of the population2.
Stood at the front door of Selleck quadrangle, I made a mental note: Take a straight walk without any turns, it would be impossible to get lost on the return. I pulled the zipper of my bulky pink down coat—the one that served as my pillow and the only evidence that I had prepared for the cold midwest winter—all the way up to my chin, turned left, and marched on, heels clicking on the sidewalk.
Lincoln was a university town, and Selleck was conveniently situated in the center of the downtown campus. The entire downtown was still in winter break mode. The streets were quiet, with few pedestrians. The street I was on was dotted with various university buildings, and what must be a bookstore. Its large windows were decorated heavily with red, casting the quiet street in a somewhat celebratory mood. I discovered later that red was the color of the university’s famous football team, the Cornhuskers, with its famous team spirit “Go Big Red!” In Chinese culture, the color red is often associated with celebration and loud noises, quite fitting with the Cornhusker’s team color and theme song when there was a game in the stadium at the north end of the downtown, as I’d later find out.
Passing the big red bookstore, I came up to the first intersection, with an Episcopal church sitting on the far corner. The intersection looked promising, for commercial activities. I stopped and carefully studied the unfamiliar small shops that lined the street. One with a funny name, Kinko’s, and next to it, was a store with a Sandwich and Soup signage above the window. My heart almost skipped a beat - a proper place for a proper meal!
I pulled open the door of the sandwich and soup place. The warm air inside immediately enveloped me. Standing by the door I surveyed the space. It was a small shop with only a few tables by the windows looking out to the street. An eating counter with bar stools was at the back, and in the middle of the counter, there was a glass case. Unfamiliar-looking food items were on display behind the glass. The place was not crowded but the tables were all occupied already. I started to feel a bit uneasy.
“Good morning!” A slightly heavy-set girl behind the counter greeted me in a happy voice. “Cold, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t quite sure if she meant it rhetorically, but it came with a smile so I smiled back and nodded in agreement.
“What can I get you today?” She gestured at the blackboard on the wall. It listed menu items in fancy cursive handwriting, too fancy for me to read when someone was waiting for my answer.
Nervousness started to rise inside me. “Um … A sandwich?” I said tentatively. I could not go wrong ordering a sandwich in a shop called Sandwich and Soup, right?
“Sure hon! What kind of sandwich?” She again gestured to the blackboard, still the happy voice.
The nervousness was now growing and I tried to keep it in check. I searched the board trying to latch on to something familiar but somehow the words were not making sense to me.
“What kind of sandwiches do you have?” I was fishing.
The smile faded a little and the girl behind the counter started to recite a list of what would be names of sandwiches, none of which sounded any more familiar than these fancy scripts on the board. Two words jumped out at the end of that long list—ham and cheese!
“Ah yes! A ham and cheese sandwich, please!” I was relieved.
“Okay. What type of cheese?”
Wait, cheese had different types? I never knew that. To me, cheese was, just cheese.
“Hm, what types of cheeses do you have?” I shamelessly repeated the same trick.
So, there came another long list from the girl, only this time, both the smile and happy tone had disappeared. Her face turned expressionless and I could almost hear her annoyance. I was getting desperate with each of the unfamiliar names of cheese she uttered, until the word “American” popped out.
“American cheese it is!” I grasped it while the sound of it was still mid-air.
“On what bread?”
The way she asked her next question made me feel she was now anticipating drawing another blank from me. I started to contemplate if I should just turn around and leave, before this little scene drew attention from anyone at the tables. Just then, something happened inside of me. What happened next, was very unlike the shy and compliant me.
“Any kind will do.” I dug in my heels, holding her gaze.
In hindsight, this was a turning point in my new life, for challenges big or small—instead of running away as I usually did, I’d take it head-on. The significance of that change only became obvious to me years later. The girl behind the counter shrugged and turned to prepare the sandwich.
I breathed relief, sat down on one of the bar stools, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and pressed it on the counter. The tightened string inside me relaxed. My mind wandered back to a story mom used to tell—that’s where I learned about sandwiches. In that story, mom was a 7-year-old girl walking to school every day with fifty cents in her pocket. That’s what her mother would give her every morning, for breakfast and lunch. Lured by the smell of freshly baked bread, she would sometimes skip breakfast so she could use the 50 cents to get a baguette with ham for lunch, a sandwich.
“So chewy, so delicious!” Mom had a happy and satisfying look on her face recounting the event. After all these years, remembering the taste of the sandwich could still bring her happiness. I imagined what the sandwich would taste like, listening to Mom’s story.
When I was seven, I saw a sandwich for the first time—a sandwich delicately cut into a triangle and wrapped in crisp translucent paper with a pink flower sticker. We were on a field trip, and the sandwich belonged to this pretty girl who was the daughter of the Japanese Consul General. I remember staring at the girl, her pretty water bottle painted with big-eyed blond anime characters, and her pretty sandwich. That delicate-looking sandwich must taste good! Not too many years after that field trip in first grade, with the opening up of the country, in came the army of Coca-Cola, KFC, and the Golden Arches. But a sandwich had always been just a sandwich, ham in between two slices of bread, deliciously simple.
“Here is your sandwich, Ma’am.” The girl reappeared with my sandwich on a plate, and, produced change for my twenty-dollar bill. She laid both on the counter in front of me.
If anyone asks me today how that proper meal—my first ever ham and American cheese on white bread—tasted, I am sorry to disappoint: I can’t remember anything about the taste but every detail of how that sandwich was “customized”. What happened before that sandwich arrived was the climax of the event. Part of the truth was also that I spent the entire mealtime nervously trying to figure out how much tip I was supposed to leave. I heard about the American custom of tipping, but never knew exactly how the calculation was to be done, and it would be a long time before I could figure out the different coins in front of me.
When I pushed open the door and reentered the chilly air, I left behind the warmth of the sandwich shop, and all the coins from the change. I hoped it would be enough for that girl behind the counter. Not bad, I assured myself. That was a proper meal. A good start. A good first day of the next chapter of my life.
With food in my stomach, I felt triumphant. The air seemed no longer that chilly. I zipped my coat, and headed straight back to where I came from, heels clicking.
What happened to the rest of the week, you may ask? Remember, the cafeteria was closed. Well, it turned out that there was a Walgreens one block from the sandwich and soup place. I made a second trip down that direction and bought a plastic cup, a carton of milk, a pack of Kraft sliced cheese (American cheese!), and a loaf of Wonder bread. Just like cheese, to me, milk was just milk, you know, the kind that came in glass bottles with dates printed on the paper wrapped around the lid and cream floating on top when you open that lid? That was the only kind I had had back home. Thinking back, I must have grabbed a carton of skim milk in that Walgreens because I remembered when I drank it in my dorm room later, I was shocked by how awful American milk tasted! Yikes!
For the rest of that week, I left the milk and cheese on the windowsill with the window cracked open so the Nebraska chilly air could serve as refrigeration. I would sit on my bed in the dorm listening to the Episcopal church bell from a distance, which served as cues for my mealtime, and having a sandwich made with two slices of Wonder bread and a slice of Kraft American cheese, and drinking a cup of skim milk. Same three meals a day, for the entire week.
To this date, a sandwich is at the bottom of my food choice list and I never drink skim milk.
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This was before the Pudong airport was built and Hong Qiao was the only airport in Shanghai.
According to 1990 census data.
A beautiful story, Yi, though I winced at what you had to go through. With a little more support, it could have been a thrilling moment! But those stumbling first steps in a new culture, they can be hard, especially when you aren't just visiting but know that this is your life for the foreseeable.
I don’t remember you eating sandwiches three meals a day for a whole week—that was a lot! But the experience was unforgettable, which made it valuable. I had a similar experience at McDonald’s when I first came to the U.S. I nervously picked a number from the menu board, handed the cashier $20, and hoped they wouldn’t ask me any questions afterward. Lol