Reunited via MySpace

When I was in the second grade, my distant relatives moved to the United States from China; this included my father’s cousin’s son and his wife and daughter, who was just about my age. My family had sponsored them to come over and they lived in my city of Fall River, MA for about a year or so until they decided to move to Dallas, Texas to live closer with the mother’s side of the family.

As time passed, we lost touch with them with the exception of the occasional phone call between the mother and my grandmother from my mother’s side. Despite the fact that these two were not blood related, they had gotten really close while she was still living in Fall River.

As I grew older, I became involved with social networking and began using sites. After being active on MySpace for a while, I started to search for old friends, including those from elementary school and this girl relative of mine who I mentioned earlier – I’ll call her my cousin to make things easier. I knew her name and I knew she was in Texas somewhere, so I looked for her. Her name is pretty unique so I did not have much trouble finding her.

So then I friend requested her and asked her if she remembered me, which luckily, she did. From there, we exchanged numbers, began texting frequently and I even started talking to her mother, who was glad to see that we were reconnecting, seeing as we were very good friends during the time they lived in MA.

From there, her mother suggested my cousin come up for a visit, and almost 2 weeks later she spent a week of summer here. While here, we found out she was not doing too well in school and so my father suggested she move in with us and go to school with us, since my brothers and I were all doing well in school. And so she did. My parents legally adopted her and she spent all of her years of high school here and then finally went back to Texas this past year for her freshmen year in college.

If we did not have this technology and social networking sites, I do not think there was any way she would have had the opportunity to get through high school here or even get into college. Nowadays, we still talk, although not as much. Occasionally we do chat over Facebook - yet another example of the usefulness of social networking sites J