In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that wonderful capacity for self-surprise as tears came streaming down my face in a windowless government office. I had taken the naturalization ceremony to be just the final checklist item on a long and tedious bureaucratic process. But standing there between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a...
Published on September 22, 2024 13:37