BOARDMAN — If you move to the Mahoning Valley from your home halfway around the world at a young age, how do you deal with the normal stress and anxiety of having to make numerous cultural and lifestyle assimilations and adjustments?

If you’re anything like Aroonrassamee Wongkeaitaroon, you write and submit a first-person detailed account chronicling your struggles, then make readers feel they are part of the journey.

Further helping you land on your feet is if your writing project wins a major essay contest — something for which the 15-year-old Boardman High School junior can lay claim.

“I was in my government class watching a film when I got a notification on my phone,” Aroonrassamee, affectionately known as “Yok,” recalled. “I thought it was the wrong person or something, and I couldn’t believe it. I was dancing in my chair.”

After finishing her dance, Yok realized that her two-and-a-half-page essay was the winning entry in this year’s statewide Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Art, Essay and Multimedia Contest for all 11th-graders.

The competition is to encourage students to reflect on King’s life, legacy, philosophies and impact on the civil rights movement and America today, as well as challenge the students to consider how they can incorporate his work in their lives, according to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, which hosted the contest.

Yok’s first six months in the U.S. were spent in San Jose, Calif., before she moved to Boardman shortly before being enrolled in January 2017 in eighth grade at Boardman Glenwood Junior High School. In her untitled essay, she captures the difficult transition of moving between two highly diverse cultures:

“I had left Thailand, where I was born and raised, equipped with a British accent, high expectations and tears in my eyes as I boarded the hostile plane. The people who had an unterminating impact on me, the food that grazed my untrained lips, the monks that sang tranquil prayers in unison, the genuine smile of the children who ran recklessly on the street, did not take off with me the night of Aug. 16, 2017.

“Six months later (at Boardman Glenwood Junior High), I was sitting at a desk in the back of the humid classroom, an American flag hanging on the top right corner of the wall … the eyes of my new peers studying the new girl who came in the middle of the year. I said nothing else, and looked down at my unchanging syllabus for the 26th time. I never said much at all; in fact, I counted how many times I said something in the third week and did not pass three sentences. … People’s judgments did not lay in my words, but rather, my dialect.”

Yok had spent grades one to five at an international K-12 school in Bangkok, where she further learned English while surrounded by teachers who, for the most part, were from Europe or Australia. Also enhancing her English-speaking acumen was being exposed to people near her father’s shoe shop in Thailand and elsewhere who spoke it fluently, she recalled.

“I love learning new languages,” said Yok, who also is Vietnamese. “It’s quite a quick process.”

While working on her essay, Yok discovered that the writing process also conjured up additional memories, such as the bond she had with her fifth-grade teacher named Mrs. Andrews, who left an indelible mark on her. The two stayed in touch via email, which Yok describes in the essay:

“Mrs. Andrews, who was now living in France, started off her letter by congratulating me on how much my English had improved, as well as reminiscing about the smiling, sensitive, innocent girl who was ever so keen to participate in any given activities. ‘I sincerely believe that, one way or the other, you will be able to find her inside you again,’ she explained to me.”

Before establishing herself in the U.S., some of her perceptions of America had been shaped by watching “cheesy high school movies,” along with others such as “Forrest Gump.”

“America at first didn’t feel real,” said Yok, whose other classes this year include Spanish, algebra, chemistry and psychology.

After high school, Yok hopes to attend an out-of-state college, though she remains undecided, then attend medical school. Her career goal is possibly becoming a neurosurgeon, she continued.

“I (also) had her as a freshman. It became pretty obvious she would benefit from honor-level classes,” Randy Nord, Yok’s advanced-placement English teacher, said.

The shy and determined student has “come out of her shell,” and would do well to also use her winning writing project as her college essay, Nord said about Yok, who also has shown a level of musical talent by playing the piano, violin and guitar when her schedule permits.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that her crowning achievements began when she penned her essay. During her fifth-grade year, Yok played violin during an event for the Royal Price of Thailand, she said.

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