A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans. There lay my house, reduced to waist-high ruins, smelly and dirty.

Before the trip, I’d had my car fixed. When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill, she noticed my Louisiana license plate. “You from New Orleans?” she asked. I said I was, “No charge,” she said, and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet. The next day I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened.

As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage (抵押贷款) on our ruined house. We looked at many places, but none was satisfactory. We’d begun to accept that we’d have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while, when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kennedy in California. He’d read some pieces I’d written about our sufferings for Slate, the online magazine, and wanted to give us (“no conditions attached”) a new house across the lake from New Orleans.

It sounded too good to be true, but I replied, thanking him for his exceptional generosity, that we had no plans to go back. Then a poet at the University of Florida offered to let his house to me while he went to England on his one-year paid leave. The rent was rather reasonable. I mentioned the poet’s offer to James Kennedy, and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months.

Throughout this painful experience, the kindness of strangers has done much to bring back my faith in humanity. It’s almost worth losing your worldly possessions to be reminded that people are really nice when given half a chance.

For many teenagers, a job is a way to earn a little extra money. For me, it is more than that.

At the age of 16, I was offered my very first job as a shopgirl in a clothing store. On the first day, my manager was training me how to fold and organize platform after platform of clothes. The work seemed overwhelming, and everything had to be done in an accurate way. I got so impatient because I couldn’t get it right the first couple of times. After about ten tries, I had the clothes folded perfectly. Then it took me thirty minutes to get them all looking uniform. Now, I fold and organize clothes every day, and I’m able to do them well. Through this experience, I’ve learned to be patient.

Helping customers and establishing connections with them is one of the things I love most about my job. About two months ago, I helped a woman who was looking for a dress. She told me exactly what she was picturing—a blue dress with long sleeves and a lace neck. We didn’t have any such dress, and when I explained that to her, she wasn’t very happy. Instead of getting annoyed, I tried getting to know her a bit better and asked what the dress was for, so I could find other items in her size that could work. We shared our love of the Netflix fashion show, and she ended up buying $200 worth of new clothes, having found other items she liked. This experience has taught me to be more open with strangers.

Every job has its share of frustrations and challenges; to do well you must learn to deal with them. I’ve learned this from my own experience, and it has helped me in other aspects of my life as well.