HOT175- Nói Với VÔ ĐỀ

The ceremony was one the dignitaries and the bureaucrats had done a hundred times over, but for the 50 people waiting to become U.S. citizens in the library auditorium, it marked the start of something new. They hailed from 32 countries: Ukraine, Vietnam, Yemen, Colombia, New Zealand.

By the end of the ceremony on Monday morning, held at Hartford Public Library on what is alternately considered Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, they’d been serenaded by a mayor singing “This Land Is Your Land” and a Department of Correction pipe and drum band. They renounced all loyalties to erstwhile homelands, pledged allegiance to their new one, and, after being handed a small flag and having shaken the hands of the lieutenant governor, secretary of the state and Hartford’s mayor, became U.S. citizens. Here are brief glimpses of their stories.

Tran Binh followed his father, Tran Trong, in becoming an American citizen Monday. Tran Trong, 75, a former schoolteacher in southern Vietnam, was pressed into military service during the war that divided his homeland into Communist north and U.S.-aligned south. He escaped from a re-education camp — “for brainwashing,” he explains — and, after stopovers in the Philippines and Malaysia, arrived in Bridgeport in 1987.

Tran Trong became a citizen in 1992, and sponsored his son, Binh, for residency. Tran Binh came from Vietnam in 1998 with his wife and two daughters. He became a citizen Monday at 53. Tran Binh’s older daughter is a family medicine doctor in Michigan, her grandfather says proudly. The younger daughter is a freshman at Fairfield University, where she is a premedical student.

“He wants to stay here for his life, for permanence and forever,” Tran Trong said of his son.