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Lydia, my wife, was born in Hong Kong and became a U.S. citizen a few years after we moved to New Jersey. Yet she really became an American in the late hours of September 12, 2001.
I had given a speech in Chicago on the evening of the 10th, discussing, among other things, China’s support for terrorism. We stayed the night in that city, and planned to fly out the next day. The following morning I was on the phone with a CNN producer who suddenly said, “Something’s just happened; I’ve got to go.” We turned on the television and watched the towers fall.
We could not leave Chicago that day, but we rented a car at O’Hare on the 12th at noon and began a 14-hour drive back home.
The trip through the cities of Illinois, the flat ground of Indiana, and the northern part of Ohio was uneventful. But somewhere in the hills of western Pennsylvania, in the dark, we saw a convoy of four or five emergency vehicles from Chicago, American flags flying, pass us as they sped to Ground Zero.
Lydia, waved to them—and they waved back.
She would not become a citizen for another three years, at the Federal Court House in Newark, but it was that night, September 12, as she watched the nation draw together, as cities like Chicago sent their finest men and women to New York, that she became an American.
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