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First Person: March 19, 1997
A Chinese immigrant, she saved everything-including her basic right of citizenship BY LENORE LOOK '84 It never made sense to me, as a second-generation American, why my mother worked so hard at getting her U.S. citizenship, then shunned its most basic duty. When I was a child she spent long hours taking language and civics lessons from an older Chinese woman who tutored recent immigrants for their citizenship exams. I remember my mother cramming for her exam and asking me for help, though I was barely in school myself. She completely covered her workbook pages with notations in Chinese as she flipped back and forth between her Chinese/English dictionary and her text, searching for the key that would unlock America for her. It was a painful trip through basic American history and simple conversational English, taken word by word through a slow, multi-step process that began with deciphering letters and syllables and ended in tears. She faced formidable obstacles to citizenship, including my uncle, who nightly at dinner proclaimed his loyalty to China and admonished her for being a "traitor." She persevered, but when she finally obtained her citizenship, in 1967, there was no celebration or even acknowledgment of what she had accomplished. Sometime after my mother took her oath of citizenship, we were joined by other members of her family-her mother, three brothers, a sister-in-law, and an infant nephew. Penniless immigrants, they had come to live with us in our modest three-bedroom, one-bath house on Beacon Hill, a deteriorating neighborhood on Seattle's south side, where Chinese were allowed to buy real estate. Their arrival turned our home into a noisy, crowded place of perpetual activity and endless chatter, an atmosphere that must have resembled at once a carnival and a cocktail party. I remember my mother as particularly happy during that time; her aura was like that of a triumphant athlete. She had moved a mountain; she had obtained the golden ticket -- citizenship -- that had brought her family to the States. But with her duty done, she began to lose most of what little English she had learned and any interest in her adopted country. It was during this period that she started working as a seamstress in a sporting-goods factory. Almost all the workers were Chinese immigrants, and few if any spoke more than rudimentary English. Despite the low wages and crippling work, my mother preferred this world, which allowed her to remain an outsider; she saw no point in adopting the language and culture of her new country. She continued to speak only Chinese, to surround herself with Chinese coworkers and friends, and to shop mostly at Chinese stores. She loathed having to use any of her fading English, and she hated American food, American TV, and most of all the rebelliousness of her American children. In the 1970s, a Chinese-American woman who owned a restaurant ran for the Seattle City Council. In our Toisan patois my mother called her despicable. "Look at her," she said. "Has she no shame? Showing herself like that!" In her eyes, running for office was tantamount to being a prostitute. My mother's aversion to politics was my attraction to it. As a teenager, I was dismissive and resentful about everything my mother stood for, everything she symbolized: tradition, filial piety, invisibility. When I began to push beyond the boundaries of our home, I was arrogant enough to determine that my life would count for more than hers. I would embrace all that she feared, all that she was not. To her chagrin, I joined the staff of my high-school newspaper. I wrote stories about local politicians and essays about political issues. For reasons that mystify me now, I joined the Young Republicans' Club. Then I fled home for college, where I majored in politics. When I cast my first vote (for Jimmy Carter), it became an opportunity to harangue my mother about her civic duty. But in her small voice, over a poor telephone connection between Seattle and Princeton, she told me that she wasn't interested. Four years later, while working as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, I reminded her again of her obligation. "Your dad voted," she said, as though his ballot alone was sufficient for the two of them. Four years later she had another excuse. Somewhere between the 1988 election and last year's, I grew increasingly cynical about my own civic duty and stopped hounding my mother about hers. My interest in politics waned as one election after another seemed to offer up the same uninspiring choices. My years of preaching political involvement were over. Then, last November, my mother called me at my home in New Jersey for one of our weekly chats. "Do you remember that family who lived in that house three blocks from us on Beacon Hill?" she asked in Chinese. "Which one?" "You went to school with their younger son, and his sister beat up your brother once. . . . Their eldest son just became governor." In The New York Times I had read with mild interest about Gary Locke's victory. His family and ours had attended the same Chinese Baptist Church, and I remembered him as a counselor at summer Bible camp. "I voted for him," she let drop. "You voted ?" "I had to. Everyone voted," she said, referring to her Chinese friends. "But you never voted before." "His mother sewed, and his father worked like yours." I understood. Her voice was clear, and for the first time she sounded proud of their immigrant life of bent-back labor. So nearly three decades after gaining her citizenship, my mother, the political outsider, stepped in from the margin of society to add her vote to the landslide victory for our nation's first Chinese-American governor. My mother voted because she saw, for the first time, a choice. An Asian-American governor would mean less discrimination, she said. It was a victory that she hoped would give Asian-Americans some sway over issues that concern them, like immigration and bilingual education, a victory that would give them respect. From its periphery, she had entered a society that until now had seemed to her indifferent and unalterable. To me, her vote revealed that in our country there are no centers or certain names around which we must arrange ourselves; instead, as Emerson said of American politics, "Any particle may suddenly become the center of the movement and compel the system to gyrate around it." My mother never wastes anything, and she didn't waste her vote. I hope she finds reason to cast it again. Lenore Look '84's first children's book, Grandma Doesn't Eat Crab, is scheduled for release by Simon & Schuster in 1998. She is completing her first full-length play, Eeny Meeny Money Moh, about the Chinese confession program during the McCarthy era.
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