My fantasy of the American dream was nothing like the reality – so I came home to the UK | Elaine Chong

Inspired by films I watched as a teenager, I got myself admitted to university in Los Angeles. But then the fairytale soured

My parents weren't pleased when I told them that I wanted to move to California for university. They didn't leave everything behind in Taiwan and Malaysia for a new life in England for their firstborn to move even farther west to the US. What could I say? This was my American dream, and I wanted to make it".

I applied to US colleges I had heard of in films. I studied SAT books and got a good enough score to attempt the admissions process. Things started to happen. I bunked off sixth form to attend interviews. In films these are huge moments of plot development, but it was difficult to feel that the rest of my life would be determined by a Yale interview in a Starbucks. Harvard and Princeton also took place in coffee shops, Stanford in a hotel lobby, and Columbia in a members' club. The interviews felt anticlimactic, and I never checked the online application portal to see if I had been admitted, because I didn't want the dream to end.

Elaine Chong is a broadcast news journalist and documentary film-maker at the BBC

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