The Citizenship Test

Nonfiction by Yuko Iida Frost

Becoming an American citizen felt like an act of severing ties with my parents. I had a green card through my first job in New York. It gave me freedom to work and live in both countries — Japan and the United States. I had no reason to switch my citizenship. Until 1997.

A colleague of mine found out that if something were to happen to her American husband, she as a French citizen would lose everything they jointly owned — a house, cars, and all other assets — thanks to the punitive inheritance tax imposed on non-citizens. She immediately applied to become an American citizen.

My husband and I didn’t own much — a tiny house and a car, but we were planning to have a child. I wouldn’t want to be the only foreigner in our family. The decision made, I went to have my fingerprints taken — the first step toward citizenship.

The immigration office was in a dilapidated wooden building that looked like a haunted mansion. I opened the door. There was another door inside and it was heavier. The room behind it was packed with people of all ages, shapes, and colors. It smelled like an Asian grocery store with exotic spices and unfamiliar produce. Everyone was seated on plastic folding chairs, looking timid and tired as if waiting to see a doctor for a terminal illness. A young receptionist stopped me just inside the second door and asked for my name and checked my driver’s license. She then gave me a form to fill out.

I looked for an empty chair. A man stood up and passed by me. One of his eyes was missing. It looked more like a quicksand than a gaping hole. What could have happened to his eye? I took his chair, and sat next to a middle-aged woman with thick black sun-scorched hair. I pulled out a pen to fill out the form: Gender; Current Residence; Place of Birth. It suddenly occurred to me that everyone in that room was born somewhere else — a foreign concept in Japan. I peeked over the shoulder of the woman sitting next to me, to see how far she might have traveled.

Cambodia.

“Cambodia?” I couldn’t help myself. “I was in Phnom Penh last week.”

She raised her head, revealing her weather-beaten face. “What is it like now? Is it safe? Is Pol Pot dead?” She looked desperate to know everything.

“He’s not dead.”

A doubt ran across her face. “He’s alive? That evil man’s still alive?” She looked up the ceiling and shook her head letting out a sigh. Imagine finding out Hitler was still alive two decades after the genocide.

She asked why I was in Cambodia.

“I work for Save the Children, and we train teachers to rebuild the schools which were completely destroyed.”

“Pol Pot destroyed everything. And he’s still alive…” She bent her head forward, her hair falling over her face again. When she looked up, her eyes were wet. “Tell me what you saw. Tell me everything.”

I told her the capital city looked safe and the restaurants and bars were teeming with young people. Occasionally I encountered those landmine victims with missing arms and legs on the street. The only time I felt unsafe was when a soldier with a gun stopped his moped in front of me and yelled at me. I was taking a morning walk in a park. He told me to go to the police headquarters with him. Across the park, a group of women washing clothes in large wooden buckets watched me bow, begging to be let go. After good half an hour of shouting, he suddenly drove off.

“We walked for four days non-stop to reach the Thai border. I had no shoes,” the Cambodian woman spoke as if she had just finished walking. “They stopped my husband and asked what he did. He said he was a farmer. He lied because they killed anyone who wasn’t a farmer. I was a nurse but I lied, too. The police shot my husband in his eye.”

“What happened to him?”

“It only blinded his one eye. He’s here; just stepped out.”

The man with a missing eye must have been her husband.

“They killed my sister and her husband and their children and most of my neighbors. They killed babies, too, tossing them in the air to shoot them like a game.” She let go of my arm and covered her face with both hands.

Her number was called. She gathered her things and left. Her eyes were still red.

“Good luck to you,” I said to her, but she silently moved on and disappeared behind the third door.

In June 1998, one year after the fingerprinting, I entered the Justice Department building in Hartford, the state capital, to take the citizenship test. A receptionist could not find my name on the computer. “You’ll have to come back,” she said in a familiar Asian accent.

I told her I had just confirmed my appointment yesterday and asked her to double check.

“I just did. You’ll have to get a new date. Next,” she shouted to the line behind me.

I told her my test date had been postponed twice already.

“There’s nothing we can do for you today. Goodbye and have a nice day.” She scoffed.

“You must’ve been an immigrant yourself once; you shouldn’t treat us like this.”

“Don’t get so personal. I’m only doing my job.”

A middle-aged woman came out and gave me a new date in September. I repeated my story. After more back and forth, she told me to wait and disappeared. When she returned, she told me to go to Room 451. Offering no apology, she turned around and was gone.

Perhaps the whole thing was part of the citizenship test to see if I could stand up for myself and question authority.

Room 451 was large, bright, and empty. I sat and pulled out a book, ready for a long wait. After what felt like a whole afternoon, a test administrator opened the door and called my name. I followed her to her office at the end of the long hallway. She made me raise my hand and swear to tell the truth.

The questions were all basic: about the type of the Constitution, the Amendments, the type of government the United States had, its structure, the names of the current President, my state Governor and representatives, and so on. Every time I answered correctly, I felt like I was winning a TV game show. Until she asked: “What forms of freedom do we have in this country?”

You name it. We have so much freedom in this country. That’s why everyone has guns and kids die from playing with them and some lunatic goes out on a shooting spree. It never ends. But what on earth is the official answer to this question?

“If you go out and stand on the street corner and speak against our government,” she said, pointing at the window behind her, “would you be arrested and put in jail?”

For a second, I remembered the morning I was stopped by a Cambodian soldier who wanted to take me to the police headquarters for no apparent reasons. I was let go, but I began imagining myself being kidnapped and tortured. I shook my head waking myself up from the daymare, and said, “Freedom of speech…freedom of religion…peaceful assembly, and …”

“We have the right to bear arms, too.”

“Right.” Of course.

She asked me to report to the office at nine o’clock on Friday, September fourth. “It’s for the oath ceremony.”

Did I just pass the test?

As she escorted me back to the exit door, I said admiringly how fascinating it must be to meet so many people from all over the world.

“Well, yeah, most of the time, but we get all kinds of crazy people.”

“Crazy people?”

“Some people come here from countries that have been fighting and killing forever, like Rwanda, and it used to be Cambodia. These people have no idea what democracy is, or what peaceful assembly means, but they all come here and become American citizens. That’s crazy.”

Who’s crazier? The Cambodian woman who survived the American carpet bombings and fled Pol Pot’s genocide? Or this woman who seemed to have forgotten the bloody civil war on this land?

On September 4, 1998, a judge entered the courtroom and the oath ceremony began. We were asked to stand, raise our hands, and swear to take up arms to defend the Constitution of the United States. The vow to fight on behalf of this country was something American-born citizens never have to make, unless they join the army or become elected officials. Imposed only on us immigrants, the oath gave me an irrevocable sense of obligation.

The judge began calling our names and the countries we had come from. I looked for the Cambodian woman. How could she move on as a citizen of the country that had bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of her fellow countrymen, which, most believed, led to the rise of Pol Pot? Would her stories ever be heard, and become part of American history? Who writes it? We’d better write it. That would be the only way to make our oath worthwhile, and to prevent the next genocide.

Outside, a long line was forming for the next oath ceremony. A group of tall women wearing bright red and orange African dresses chatted rapidly in French. A man stood by a woman, whose head was completely covered with a scarf, talked in a language I did not recognize to two young women, perhaps their daughters, who then replied in English with perfect American accents.

Passing the long line of immigrants, despite our differences, or perhaps because of them, I felt welcomed. The door opened and the breeze lifted my hair. It was a smooth drive back home. The sky was clear. The green hills in the distance stretched gracefully as they always had, even before anyone came to this continent and claimed ownership. Now it was mine, too.

Yuko Iida Frost was born and grew up in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1981, Yuko left for the United States to pursue higher education. She earned a BA in Government from Smith College in 1988, and an MBA from Yale University in 1995. She worked for The Brookings Institution, Save the Children, and ran her own tea company. In 2021, after 15 years of teaching math and science in Japanese to fifth- and sixth-graders in Virginia’s public schools, she retired to write full time.

Her most recent essay, “Tangled in Seaweed,” was published in LIT Magazine’s September 2023 issue. Other short memoir excerpts also appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, the 34th Parallel, Apple Valley Review, which awarded her a 2022 Editor’s award and nominated her story for Pushcart Award. One short essay is scheduled to appear in Cimarron Review in Spring of 2024. She has also authored for The Brookings Institution and other publications on the roles of NGOs (non-governmental organizations).