What I remember most about my childhood summers is watching the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Every year, my father would crank up our secondhand, peach-colored station wagon, and we'd clatter out to a din of patriotic cheer. We would join the other cars idling in traffic, park in some impossibly small space, find a bench or a patch of grass, plop down and crane our necks skyward.
Jenny Zhang, a Georgia Tech student who came to the United States when she was 5, became a U.S. citizen in June.
I never realized that, technically, Independence Day wasn't ours to celebrate. We were citizens of China, living in America on a student visa and the currency of hope.
In 1992 my parents had left everything — family, friends, jobs — to bank on a fellowship that my father, Yujia, had received to attend graduate school at the University of Georgia.
We arrived with three suitcases and a thin stack of cash. My mother, Lisa, formerly an accountant with a successful firm in China, worked six days a week as a waitress to help put food on the table. My father retaught himself in English the subjects that he already knew in Chinese, studying into the early morning hours. I started kindergarten, embarrassed that I didn't know how to ask where the bathroom was.
Adjusting was difficult at first, as anything strange and new is. Language was my hardest hurdle. I learned words by bringing one home from school every day for my father to translate. I soon graduated to sentences and grammar, picking up English in bits and pieces.
I remember being put in ESL (English as a Second Language) class with the Hispanic students — how confused I was by the Spanish I heard, and how proud I was when my English improved enough for me to leave the class a year later.
Settling in
At that age, the only crime was being different, and speaking English was my passport to normalcy, to "nonalien" status. So I settled smoothly into my life in the United States, worrying more about not having new crayons than about not being an American.
Yujia Zhang takes the oath of allegiance during his naturalization ceremony this summer. Zhang and his daughter, Jenny, became U.S. citizens weeks apart.
As far as I was concerned, I was an American. I loved bluejeans and jazz; pledged allegiance to the flag every morning; proudly recited the preamble to the Constitution, with its grand ideals of justice and liberty; and gradually took being an American for granted, like almost everyone else.
Sure, there were always a few sidelong glances, a vague sense of being foreign. Growing up, there were more than a few times when I had to disappoint someone because, no, I did not know martial arts like Jackie Chan, nor did I eat cats or dogs.
The true hardships were borne by my parents. I was so little; what did I know about making ends meet and raising a family? My parents were towers of strength, working constantly and saving all they could. We rarely ate out, never went to the movies and ate more rice than meat for dinner.
Still, I never thought of us as poor or life as difficult. We were in America, the golden land of opportunity, where the promise of a better life blazed like the Statue of Liberty torch. We were lucky to be here.
As soon as they could, my parents steered us onto the path to citizenship. They went through mountains of paperwork, hired a lawyer to plead our case and paid thousands of dollars in processing fees alone.
Becoming a citizen
Fifteen years after I arrived in the United States, this June, I took my oath of allegiance in a somewhat underwhelming naturalization ceremony and was pronounced a U.S. citizen. It didn't seem terribly important at the time, even though I knew it should have.
When I attended my father's naturalization ceremony three weeks later, it still didn't seem that special. My father was beaming from ear to ear, but, to me, citizenship was just a piece of paper. Who gets excited about paper?
It didn't hit me until the Fourth of July. My family and I were camped out in our driveway, waiting for the fireworks to start. Our two-story house stood in silhouette behind us; our two cars were safely parked in the garage.
My parents were laughing and joking, the harder times only a memory. My father has a good job that pays well, and my mother spends her days tending her garden instead of reciting lunch specials.
Dusk faded to dark, and the first sparklers shot brilliant trails of light across the sky. As the fireworks whistled into the air and burst in glittering explosions of red, white and blue, I realized we were all together and happy, with more than we could have dreamed possible in China. We were living the American dream. And I was proud to be a citizen.
— Jenny Zhang, a student at Georgia Tech, was an intern with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last summer.