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AI: And I've, then, also during this process of getting your book out -- and, of course, your son was growing up, and you have, going through some family changes -- but also, you decided that you were going to apply for U.S. citizenship. You didn't, when you came back and you had lost the years of credit that you had previously, what, what was it that finally decided you to go through it?

PJ: It was fear of being separated from my son. It was actually two things. It was fear of being separated from my son, and wanting to vote. And I just felt like I had been paying taxes -- you know, people talk about immigrants -- but I actually paid social security taxes for the whole time that I was here, and I didn't get any benefits out of that. And I saw that the environment, since 1996 on the Immigration, Welfare Reform Act, which also reformed immigration so dramatically, that the environment was tenser, and more and more tense for immigrants. And I just really feared that something would happen where my son and I would be separated, and I wasn't gonna let that happen. And so I applied for citizenship as soon as I was eligible. And it was touchy because I was applying as a spouse, but my husband at the time and I had actually separated. And the interviewer asked about our status, and I told him honestly, and he... we weren't divorced, we were just newly separated. And it wasn't clear that we wouldn't get back together at that time, but they could have denied us. But he was, I got very lucky, 'cause a lot of INS officials, I think, wouldn't have been so understanding. But, so, yeah.

So I applied for citizenship and realized that it was much more moving to me, the ceremony, than I had ever expected. I was, got very emotional and teary, on many counts. One, that they ask you to renounce your, any other allegiance to any other country, which I felt I couldn't do, because how do you renounce, emotionally, how do you renounce an allegiance to the country that you grew up in, or that you're connected to, or that your parents live in? Which certainly doesn't mean that I don't love America, but, so I just sort of kept my mouth quiet through that piece, because I just don't think it's a realistic request to say, "You have to renounce any emotional -- " in fact, I think they say "emotional tie." I don't know how you can do that. But on the other side, very moving for me to see kind of the other people who were there, and what it meant to them to get U.S. citizenship, and really what it meant to me as well. And acknowledging the debt that I owed to this country in terms of the opportunities I had been given here. So a little of everything, again, kind of the mix of feelings and emotions that always comes into play in something like that.

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.