Reminding Us of Gifts Taken for Granted

Mohammed Meah left a message on my answering machine, telling me the biggest day of his life was coming up. When I got to his Westlake house a little on the early side Friday morning, I re-read a story I wrote about him three years ago.

Mohammed grew up in Bangladesh, where he fell in love with a girl whose family felt that he wasn’t good enough for her. Broken-hearted, he took a foreign ministry posting in South Korea.

One day, Mohammed was lounging in his apartment when the phone rang. It was the wrong number, but he had a nice chat with the caller, a young woman named Young Moon.

Another phone call led to a meeting, which began a friendship, from which a romance blossomed.

Just one problem.

Moon’s family decided Mohammed wasn’t good enough for her.

A two-time loser, Mohammed devised a plan. He would move to the United States and find a job, save his money and send for Young Moon. They’d get married in the United States, where no one would stand in their way.

And so it was that in 1990, Mohammed began working at two 7-Elevens in Los Angeles, eventually pulling 10- and 15-hour shifts as a manager.

Four years later, he sent for Young Moon and they were married. A year later, they had a son named Steven.

In 1997, Mohammed bought his own store, a little market west of downtown near MacArthur Park.

I met him there just after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he was mocked and cursed by customers who told him to go back home. One called him a terrorist and another flashed a knife, threatening to slit his throat.

It was like having his heart broken again, this time by his adopted country. But Mohammed quickly recovered, because loyal customers boosted his spirits and promised to watch out for him.

This brings us to Friday. Mohammed had invited me to join him, his family and his best friend in a ceremony at the Los Angeles Convention Center. He was about to become a United States citizen.

“This is the biggest dream,” Mohammed said as he pulled on a nice sweater in his living room, where Steven’s award-winning artwork is on the wall near the piano the 9-year-old is learning to play.

“It’s bigger than winning the Super Lotto jackpot, because some happiness you can buy with money, and some happiness you cannot buy.”

At the moment, little Steven was happy because he was playing with a GameBoy. But as we were leaving, Mohammed told him enough is enough.

“Stop it,” he told his son. “You’re going to win GameBoy and lose your brain.”

Mohammed has high hopes for the boy. He and Young Moon sent him to an Islamic school to learn his father’s faith, then transferred him to a Christian school to bone up on academics. Now he’s in a public school so he can learn to get along with everyone in the city of immigrants.

Mohammed’s buddy Iqbal Hossain drove us to the convention center.

“I’m very excited for him,” said Iqbal, who worked for Mohammed at a 7-Eleven and now works at a midcity Chevron station. They’re from the same town in Bangladesh, and Iqbal has been going through the citizenship process for several years. Iqbal added, “I look forward to my dream coming true one day, too.”

Traffic was heavy around the convention center, because Mohammed would be one of 4,052 people, representing 122 countries, to take the oath of naturalization in a massive ceremony. Mohammed had begun the process in 1994.

There’s hope here, Mohammed said in explaining the endless wave of immigrants. You have the freedom to be with the person you love, to pursue the career of your choice, to practice any faith. It still amazes him, he said, that in just 14 years of seven-day workweeks, he has a business, a car and a house with a little garden.

The honorees filed off in one direction at the convention center and their families and friends were directed to another part of the auditorium. Mohammed waved and smiled at us as he disappeared into the crowd of citizens-to-be.

The whole world was in the room, each person having followed a trail blazed centuries ago. With all this country’s problems, life here is gloriously rich by comparison, and made all the richer by the kind of desire that filled the auditorium. It was a scene out of Ellis Island, stripped of cynicism.

U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew, whose parents came to the United States from Southern China in the 1920s in search of work, presided over the ceremony. Mohammed and all the others raised right hands as Lew delivered the oath of naturalization, which began:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic ... “

“Applaud yourselves,” Lew said as 4,052 tiny U.S. flags waved and the new citizens cheered. “That is absolutely beautiful. Applaud yourselves on being the newest citizens of America.”

It’s easy to take U.S. freedoms and benefits for granted if you’re born with them, Lew said. He likes presiding over these ceremonies, because naturalized citizens understand sacrifice and appreciate opportunity.

Lew told them he was one of nine children, and that his immigrant father urged him to become a lawyer. In fact, he told the crowd, he became the first Chinese American federal judge in the continental United States.

“That’s not to say how prideful I might be,” Lew said, but to remind everyone that with education and determination, there are no limits.

All the guests waited outside for the newest citizens to emerge into bright mid-December sunlight and parade along a roped-off walkway. The first to appear was an elderly woman in a wheelchair, waving a flag, and a cheer went up.

Mohammed came into the opening with a radiant smile and hurried over to his family for hugs and congratulations.

“I feel such a release after so many years, such relief, I don’t have the right words to express it,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been born again.”

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com and previous columns can be read at latimes.com/lopez.