A Rite of Passage : 1,300 New Citizens Follow a Tradition From East to West

At a Thursday morning swearing-in ceremony at the Los Angeles Convention Center, 1,300 ethnic Chinese took the oath of citizenship from U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew, one of three Chinese-American federal judges.

Never before, organizers said, had so many people of a single ethnicity become American citizens at the same time in the same place.

The event kicked off a yearlong celebration of 200 years of immigrants who have imported their dreams not from Europe, but from the Orient.

A consensus of historians say the tradition began about 200 years ago this month, when a trading ship with Chinese crew members landed in Hawaii. Some of the crew got off, taking the first steps in a Chinese immigration that eventually brought America some its most resourceful people.

New American Tseng Wang, 72, said he is ready to embrace the responsibilities as well as the perks of citizenship.

Better Job Prospects

“Voting is a privilege,” he said, holding his copy of the Constitution and Pledge of Allegiance.

For 34-year-old Kam Rust, being an American means better job opportunities.

“I filled out 30 pages of forms for this job,” she recalled. “And then they told me I had to be an American citizen.”

The Santa Barbara resident and her husband, Frank, thought they had been asked to travel downtown to verify their marriage.

But no one asked the Hong Kong emigre to produce her tax forms and canceled checks. Instead, the health data researcher was directed to the mass swearing-in ceremonies.

Afterward, Rust stuck a mini American flag in her lapel and watched as fifth-graders from Chinatown performed “It’s a Grand Old Flag” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“This is a kind and generous country,” she said of an adopted land that has not always been so friendly.

From 1888 to the middle of World War II, the federal government would not allow Chinese laborers, many of whom laid down the West’s railroads for a dollar a day, to bring over their families, said Angi Ma Wong of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.

Without a traditional nuclear family to divide the labor, some Chinese men concentrated on cooking, others on laundering. They eventually turned both pursuits into prosperity, despite laws that segregated them and barred them from owning land and becoming citizens, Wong said, describing just one facet of the ethnic Chinese experience in America.

Ethnic Chinese moved to Los Angeles a decade before the Civil War and brought with them to the arid region an invaluable knowledge of irrigation, she said.

More than a quarter-million ethnic Chinese, including a recent wave of Southeast Asian refugees, live in Southern California, said William Chan of the New Kwong Tai Press, a Los Angeles Chinese-language newspaper.

Henry Hwang, 59, a member of the Chinese-American Bicentennial Advisory Committee, said he moved to America in 1951 to get a graduate degree, naively expecting instant success.

“I had to do manual work to find jobs. I (felt) lost and didn’t know what to do,” said Hwang, now president of Far East National Bank.

“I have more than fulfilled my American dream,” said Hwang, whose children include a Broadway playwright and an Ivy League professor.

Double Heritage

Hwang spoke to the new citizens after they took their oaths, telling them they would change America, and be changed by it.

“Your future is America,” he said. “Stand by her and guide her.”

Historian Wong said Chinese-Americans can take pride in a double heritage.

“They realize, ‘I may be American, but when I look in the mirror, there’s an ethnic Chinese looking back at me,’ ” she said.

Wong said she hopes the yearlong focus on Chinese immigration will help all U.S. citizens look into the mirror of their heritage and see reflected the contributions of Chinese-Americans.