Khi đặt chân lên vùng đất mới
Ngọn gió đầu Thu đã vội vàng
Chiếc áo mong manh sao đủ chắn
Đám lạnh tê người tạt rít ngang
Khi tuyết ngoài đường gần tới gối
Trên vai bao gạo vác về nhà
Dẫu mỏi không nơi dừng tạm nghỉ
Bước đầu khó thể hình dung ra
Khi Xuân hoa nở đủ sắc màu
Như niềm hy vọng như ước ao
Như mảnh đất hiền ngầm ưng thuận
Giữ giùm hạt giống để ngày sau
Khi khắp đó đây khoảng rợp xanh
Muốn gom hết nắng Hạ để dành
Hong khô tâm sự loài di trú
Nước mắt ... tình đời ... vết chiến tranh
NhàQuê Sep 29, 2017
50 People From 32 Countries Become Citizens At Hartford Ceremony: 'We Wanted Not Just To Be, But To Belong'
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, Tran Trong
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.
