Freedom above all
Chinese scientist chooses America with naturalization at 74
January 20, 2004
By CECILIA M. VEGA
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
When De Yu Lu made her first trip to the United States two decades ago as a visiting scientist from China, her arrival was international news.
China’s borders were all but locked then and media from around the country quizzed Lu about life in her communist homeland and her first impressions of a free society.
“I loved this country, all this modern technology,” she recalled. “Everything was so new.”
Those lasting first impressions never faded and at 74, Lu, who spent most of her life admiring the United States from afar, can now finally call the country her own.
The soft-spoken woman, wearing a tiny American flag on her lapel, will join hundreds of others from around the world today in a swearing-in ceremony for U.S. citizenship at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco.
For Lu, who lives in Santa Rosa, it has been a long time coming.
“You have freedom for everything here. You can do whatever you want,” she said. “In China it’s different. You don’t have a lot of freedom for your choice.”
Though the ceremony will send her home with a certificate of naturalization proving her new status and allowing her such entitlements as voting, sitting on a jury and carrying a U.S. passport, for Lu, the benefits are much simpler.
Citizenship guarantees that she can live permanently in a country that now is home to two of her three children.
“My green card expires in 2005,” she said in her Mandarin accent. “If I’m not a citizen I might have to go back.”
Law students from Empire College in Santa Rosa, which operates an elder law clinic in the lobby of Lu’s apartment building, helped Lu navigate her way through the complicated path to naturalization.
There were fees, exams, paperwork and more paperwork for Lu to complete before she was invited to take her oath of allegiance. The law students helped with translations and letter writing to speed up the application process, which took about a year.
“This is a woman we want in this country,” said David Hamilton, a senior law student who will drive Lu to her ceremony today. “This is someone that helped find the cure for cancer.”
A biologist by training, Lu worked at the Columbus Children’s Hospital in Ohio, where she studied gene therapy techniques for cancer patients after moving to the United States in 1990.
Before that, she had come to the country numerous times on various research fellowships at such universities as Yale and Johns Hopkins.
After each one- or two-year stint in America, however, Lu would return to China to be with her family.
“I just wanted to learn here and bring it back to China,” she said.
But life under the watchful eye of a communist government left her longing for the freedom she had briefly tasted in the United States. She recalled living in her homeland and having to ask the government for permission to change jobs, and seeing others stuck in jobs they were not allowed to leave.
Lu encouraged her three children to attend college in America. Now her daughter is an accountant living in Cupertino, her son is an engineer in Miami and another son is completing his post-doctoral work in Toronto. Two have obtained U.S. citizenship and one is a Canadian citizen.
Her husband, who never moved to the United States because he was unable to obtain a green card, died in China last year.
“American children are so lucky,” said Lu, whose three grandchildren are American-born. “They can grow up in this lovely land and have everything they want.”
In 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 32,018 natives of China became U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which was known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service before being merged into the Department of Homeland Security.
That made up just 5 percent of naturalizations in 2002; most of those who became naturalized citizens were from Mexico.
Lu moved to Santa Rosa in 1999 because her son was working as an engineer in the area. She has a studio apartment in a Salvation Army-run complex for senior citizens.
“The only thing that is not convenient for me is that I don’t drive,” she said.
Life, otherwise, is everything Lu imagined it would be.
“We have freedom of religion, freedom to choose whatever you like.”
You can reach Staff Writer Cecilia M. Vega at 521-5213 or cvega@pressdemocrat.com.
Source: Press Democrat
Today marks the 31st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. In the last 31 years millions and millions of innocent children have been killed in order to give women the freedom to be selfish and immature. 
For all of our faults, the US is still a great country and we are damn lucky to live here without having to make an effort to become citizens.