Lily is shown as a child in China.

Joining Lily in a naturalization ceremony at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus were 261 others who became citizens that day along with their more than 300 guests. The ceremony was the final step of a long process that goes back months for Lily.

According to Lily, the entire process took around three months overall. She had to be interviewed in Columbus, and she had to undergo an FBI check in Pittsburgh. However, the hardest part was the citizenship test for which she studied two months.

The citizenship test is only ten questions long but is chosen from a pool of 100 questions that must be studied. Questions cover topics such as who holds public offices and general American history. Once six questions are answered correctly, the test taker has passed. When asked about how many questions she had to answer, Lily smiled and said, “Only six.”

Lily began her life in the Fujian province of China. The province lies at a nearly equal distance between Shanghai and Hong Kong and sits across the East China Sea from Taiwan.

Lily moved to America when she was six, so she remembers little of her time in China. However, she does remember going to school.

In what would be a startling proposition for most American parents, Lily said that it was an option to stay at the school during the week and then go home on the weekends. The teachers would teach during the day and work as nannies during the evenings and nights. “We slept in bunk beds,” Lily says of one of her only memories of staying the night at school.