![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() We all passed, exiting one by one from the interrogation rooms-I mean interview rooms, shooting each other furtive smiles and measuredly triumphant thumbs-ups as the next person was called in for their turn. Posturing as innocent, we sat ourselves citizenly in the waiting room, with our hands folded citizenly over the laps of our citizenly-crossed legs. The interview itself was pretty anticlimactic. My sister and I, thoroughly Americanized, suavely scrolled through PDFs of the study guides we’d found online, maybe two or three times. His pocketbook was tattered, dog-eared, circled, underlined, and scribbled over in Korean (English is not his first language) until the pages turned black. My parents, particularly my dad, had overprepared. USCIS-certified study guides in hand, we’d toss the 100 civics questions to each other, chortling at how well we’d memorized the answers to US history trivia, playfully gibing each other over the ones we’d persistently forget, and concocting deranged acronyms to cement them in our minds. In the days before the big interview, we spent every spare moment huddled around the dinner table, snuggled in bed, or lounging on the couch, preparing, preparing, preparing for the interview. ![]() My family and I went through the ordeal together: denouncing our loyalty to the Republic of Korea, reading the requisite oaths with their long, scary words, swearing not to be communists, and withholding the bitter news from our relatives back home, lest they feel more estranged from us than they already were. In January, I was finally naturalized-after a cumulative three-quarters of my life spent in this godforsaken country-as an official US citizen. ![]()
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