Civis

This morning I took the oath to become a United States citizen. I’m not entirely sure why, but I decided against dressing up as an Oakland A’s fan or even in my usual slacker uniform of a t-shirt and jeans. In the end I left the house in my business casual work clothes and shoes with heels. The Sweet Pea was left at home with his great-grandma and my sister volunteered to drop Evie off at school. J took the day off to go with me and together we ran out the door to catch a BART train to San Francisco. I would have loved to take the kids along but it was a school day and it would have been hard for the Sweet Pea to sit through the ceremony.

The oath was being held at The Nob Hill Masonic Center and I pondered aloud what it meant for American citizens to be sworn in at the local Masonic center. I didn’t have to ponder for long as it soon became abundantly clear that the court house setting I had previously envisioned would not have been adequate. There were 1511 people there waiting to be sworn in along with countless family members and friends who came to support their loved ones.

Together, we represented 95 different countries from Afghanistan to Zambia; as rich as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway, and as poor as Burma, Laos, and Sierra Leone. Together, all 1511 of us, were herded like cattle into the large auditorium with signs that pointed our relatives and friends to the balcony. Other signs asked us to have our “Alien cards” and notification letters ready in order to be pointed to our designated sections and seats. It seemed, for that short while I was waiting in line, that this supposedly momentous event was very impersonal. Any hope to have a loved one sitting next to me to hold my hand as I move forward with this new status as a citizen of somewhere was gone. I looked at my surroundings and saw that I was also over dressed and should have worn my tennis shoes. I wondered who the free masons were and thought of how the founding fathers of the United States had a great many members amongst them. I thought about my addiction to the internet and information and how I’m so used to having knowledge at my fingertips. I thought about the giant stained glass windows that portrayed brown faced men and how refreshing it was that they weren’t pink faced. I looked around me and saw people who looked like me. I listened and heard the language of my childhood, a non-English tongue I could understand. A woman was admonishing her mother the way I sometimes admonish mine for fussing with extra paperwork when it wasn’t needed.

Today I took the oath for United States citizenship with one thousand five hundred and ten other people. Together we had disparate pasts from 95 other nations. We heard speeches that told us that no matter what we did prior to this date, we were not Americans. Living here for more than five years did not make us American, making a life here and assimilating to this culture does not make us Americans, navigating and putting up with the giant bureaucracy that is the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services does not make us Americans; taking this oath does. I thought about all the Americans who by accident of birth got a free pass on the oath.

J, my accidental American husband, was in the balcony somewhere, it was impossible to tell where and equally impossible for him to find me. Of course he had forgotten his cell phone. The words “technology” and “crutch” went through my mind quite a few times. Our master of ceremonies greeted everyone and explained the program. He welcomed everyone with several sentences in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Russian, French, and requested members of the audience to suggest one more country. The Filipinos were the loudest and were treated to a welcome from our multilingual MC in Tagalog. I thought that was cool. I wished the Vietnamese weren’t so quiet. For some reason it would have been cool to hear a white man speaking Viet. I didn’t say anything during the entire ceremony outside of the oath.

Next came a video on Ellis Island which was really an advertisement for the relatively new USCIS (which was created from the carcass of the century and then some old INS and bastardized by the Department of Homeland Security). We had been told by our MC that the line to get into the auditorium would be the last immigration line we would ever have to stand in. Now, he told us, we get to stand in citizenship lines. During the video I saw the citizenship lines growing longer and longer as I thought about the implications of showing a video about Ellis Island and not Angel Island or even with any mention of Angel Island to a crowd of immigrants waiting to be naturalized in San Francisco of all places. “100 million Americans can trace their ancestry to someone who passed through Ellis Island” the video said. 100 million more-than-likely European Americans I thought. During the years that all those Europeans were pouring into Ellis, Asians were restricted due to racist laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. The back of my mind knocked at my cynicism.

I had to look up again to look at the faces around me. Who cares about the past now? We’re speaking an oath that leaves the past behind in memory. Many of those faces looked like mine, their skin had a familiar complexion. We are here together and I teared up a bit thinking of what it meant now, for once in my life knowing for sure that I can stay for good and that I can belong here forever and ever officially. They showed another video with pictures of the different immigrants who became naturalized citizens and was surprised to see a picture of Vietnamese boat people flash on the screen. This is what we came for, I left the doubts behind and stood up when they called my old country, “Vietnam” and took the oath to relinquish my ties with the old country and defend the new amongst my peers.