Citizenship Was No Given, and Freedom No Idle Dream

Every time the Fourth of July rolls around, I remember the day my mother became a U.S. citizen.

I was a first-grader at a Jersey City elementary school, and I got to miss class that day. Although I had rarely missed a day of school, my mother woke me up that morning and told me my near-perfect attendance record was going to have another blemish. My first reaction was typical for a kid: pure celebration.

Then I got worried. After all, my parents were the type of people who firmly believed that a day off from school was a black mark on life. There were other indications that something was wrong. Instead of my usual jeans and T-shirt, my mother dressed me in a pink dress and patent-leather shoes, my brother in a jacket and tie.

We closed down the family laundry. We lived in the back. It was yet another indication that something was special about that day. We never closed the store on a business day. My Ba Ba (father) opened the store six days a week, from 8 in the morning to 6 at night. And if a customer wanted his clothes on a Sunday, all he had to do was knock on the glass door, and the store was opened.

We hitched a ride with a family friend to a federal courthouse. There, I kept my eyes on the scruffy tiled floors and watched a man smoke his cigar. And I clutched my mother’s hand. My father, who was already a citizen, was going to be my mother’s witness. Everyone looked so solemn. Though she wouldn’t admit at the time, my mother was scared. Ma Ma was there to meet with a judge who would determine whether citizenship would be granted.

Years later, I found out that she had spent years learning English for that day. Every Friday, my mother, a seamstress, would go to Chinatown in lower Manhattan, just on the other side of the Holland Tunnel, for English lessons.

After a 12-hour workday, she spent hours in a classroom learning to read and write. When she came home, she practiced her English with us and found new words to say when she watched TV. My father watched John Wayne cowboy movies; he communicated relatively well in English. My mother’s favorite programs included Tom Jones’ variety show; her English wasn’t so good back then.

Some of my most vivid memories are of my mother, struggling to learn a new language. I can still see her sitting by the red Formica kitchen table, struggling over “Dick and Jane” books, trying to write the letters that were so strange to her.

Sometimes, she would stop in exasperation, then relax by telling my brother and me a story about China. Sometimes the stories were so real that I felt I was there in the paddy fields working alongside my mother and my aunts. The water, my mother said, was so cold that she shivered even with the hot China sun beaming down on her head. Her back, she said, would hurt from the strain of bending over again and again.

Like so many transplanted people, my mother never really left China, never forgot her family. She sent money to relatives. Ma Ma talked about returning, but only when the government would change and be less tyrannical to its people.

When the stories were over, Ma Ma went back to her English books and started again, mouthing the words over and over.

When it was time for her to meet with the judge, Ma Ma almost forgot her second language. The judge asked her to write several sentences down. And at first she couldn’t. She was so nervous, her fingers couldn’t clutch the pen, and her hands couldn’t stop shaking. Then her mind cleared.

Ma Ma wrote down that she liked school and asked the judge, “How are you?” He approved her citizenship. The whole ceremony must have taken less than a hour.

At home, we skipped the rice for lunch. We fried hot dogs in the wok and ate them on Wonder bread--a real American meal.

I can’t say I suddenly felt “all-American” that day. At age 6, the meaning of citizenship--especially for someone born in this country--was not easy to understand. Citizenship, for me, meant a day off from school, hot dogs in the wok and solemn faces.

But for my parents, being U.S. citizens was the culmination of everything they had gone through to become “legal” in this country. The years of sacrifice, of slowly learning another language, another culture. While nothing changed for me that day, everything changed for my parents. They were now both United States citizens.