Losing a Part of Myself?

I recently became a citizen of the United States. And when I mean recently, I mean just a couple of weeks ago. I have lived in the U.S. for more than thirteen years and was raised here. When people find out that I was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there until I was about nine years old, they’re very surprised. Or so they tell me anyway. And although I was born in Saudi Arabia, I have always been a citizen of India. That’s where my parents are from, that’s where I feel most at home, and that’s a part of me that I never want to lose.

The whole process of becoming a U.S. citizen took an extremely long time. First, you have to apply for your green card or permanent resident card, live in the country for a certain number of years, and then apply for citizenship. For some people it takes longer than normal, and I think my family and I fell into that category.

We did delay the whole applying for citizenship process for as long as possible and for various reasons. The biggest being: could a simple sheet of paper change our devotion and ties to our heritage? By becoming a citizen would that mean that we were going to completely give up being Indian? When asked to identify myself does that mean I call myself an American, an Indian, or an Indian-American? Most of my entire extended family lives in India. We try to make trips every year or every other year. Would it become a situation where I wasn’t going to see them as often and soon they’ll become strangers to me as well? Were they going to think of us as too American or too assimilated into American culture and life?

Truthfully those were a lot of the things that we considered when deciding whether to go ahead with it or not. I know it’s just a piece of paper that signifies that you’ve become a citizen, but that piece of paper means so much to so many people. For me it was a pretty easy decision, of course; I have practically lived here my entire life. But when my parents moved here, they gave up so much. They moved thousands of miles away from their families. Their brothers and sisters lived in an entirely different country. They saw their parents only once every few years. I can’t even imagine that. If I go more than a month without seeing my family I tend to feel so separated and I end up feeling lost without them. I’m not sure how they did it at all. They gave up so much in order to raise us kids and give us all of the opportunities in the world. We’ve had it pretty easy compared to most other people.

So when I was sitting in that courtroom, taking my oath of allegiance, along with seventy-five other people from thirty-three other countries, in Milwaukee, Wis., it was weird how all I could think about was how I was missing work for this. It has been a long process, and for some people it really is a sense of accomplishment. Because they’ve been through the struggles, the hardships, and everything else it took to get to that courtroom. They weren’t giving up their identities and where they were coming from. It was mostly, I believe, their sense of accomplishment for getting there. The things they had to go through, the things they gave up for it, the sense of belonging, but not really all at the same time. It was just really nice to be able to share that moment with them.