A hard first day in America

Ashleigh Landau turned a tough time into a $1,000 award - with another $1,000 going to the Marysville school she attends.

Landau, a student at the Marysville Charter Academy for the Arts, is a winner in the California Story Slam competition. The 17-year-old wrote about what she calls "one of the hardest days of my life."

That was Aug. 20, 2003, when she arrived with her family in the United States.

"As we entered the airport, I caught my first look at America, bright, loud, colorful," her winning story reads in part. "I had left Africa behind, my only life."

The Landau family moved from South Africa and her story, "Realization," details her thoughts on her first day here.

Ashleigh said she'll use the money she won to help pay for college. Her writing in the story competition sponsored by the California Arts Council won her charter school an additional $1,000. The project encourages students to use their lives and emotional journeys to create literature, according to the council. Ashleigh was one of seven winners in the state.

Success for Ashleigh has a lot do with the Landau home in Browns Valley, which her father Chris describes as "looking like a library."

"We have thousands of books," he said. "We've got bookcases all over the place. We've got books in boxes."

Ashleigh's mother, Susan, said the family talks about what they've read and why some writing works and some doesn't.

"Our family is a bunch of readers," Susan said.

Ashleigh was surprised by the award because months passed between her entering the writing competition and the announcement that she'd won.

"I actually thought I had lost," she said.

Her father, a geologist, said his own tries at writing see very little daylight.

"I always find my work very trite and throw it away as soon I read it," Chris said.

He said he understands why his daughter would write about the challenges of the family's new life in America.

"It's much harder than you think," he said of coming to a new country. The language is the same, but so many things - customs, which side of the road you drive on - are different, Landau said.

An older daughter attending the University of California, Davis, helped lead to the family decision to move to Browns Valley in the Yuba foothills.

Writing by the prize winner's mother includes a fantasy adventure novel. "It needs severe editing," Susan said of her manuscript.

Appeal-Democrat reporter Ryan McCarthy can be reached at 749-4707 or at rmccarthy@appealdemocrat.com.