The City of Boston Office of Immigrant Advancement is hosting its annual Citizenship Day event on May 2, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center.

The day is aimed at helping anyone who wants to start the application process to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. The event is held in conjunction with Project Citizenship, which helps to organize and provide help during the day.

Last year, Shu Sing Paul Wong started the process at Citizenship Day to become a naturalized citizen. He said while he’s been a green card holder for about 10 years previously, he felt 2025 was the year to finally declare the United States his home.

“I can now share the happiness with my coworkers, family and friends,” he said. “I have the right to vote now! I can choose my candidates in all the elections. It is a good feeling for me.”

Wong said he first came to the United States in 2016 after retiring from his job in Hong Kong. Wong grew up and was educated in Hong Kong and built his life there as a teacher educator with Hong Kong University. But his family and he eventually decided to make the move to Boston. He said he retired, got all his paperwork in order, moved here and took a whole year off.

“I made the decision for early retirement with my wife and to move here in July of 2016 with my wife and daughter,” he said. “She was a senior in high school, and she started a new year of study in the U.S.

And so we took a vacation year with my family there.”

Wong said he was pretty strict about keeping his vacation to only a year.

“I found that I still wanted to make my contribution to society,” he said. “And therefore I worked as a part-time teacher in the after-school program and also in a childcare center as the movement teacher, and then after a while I got my job at the Urban College of Boston as a program coordinator and an adjunct professor.”

He now has a full-time job as a professor at UMass Boston in the Department of Early Education.

Wong said he found the teaching environment in Boston to be much more cooperative and communal than in Hong Kong, where he said it was very much a top-down hierarchical approach to education. He said he felt like he learned a lot from both systems and was able to use lessons learned from both.

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Wong said after a while of teaching in the United States and learning to love Boston – he said the city was always very friendly, at least to him – he felt it was time to become a United States citizen, for some very good reasons, and, perhaps, some rather frightening ones.

“Whenever someone asks me now, I can say, ‘Yes, I am citizen,’” he said. “I feel safe about that. Whenever the police ask me, I can say I’m a citizen. Because I am a little bit scared about the current national situation with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The political changes in the last year-and-a-half, I’m a little bit scared about that. And now, I’m released from that. Although I was a green card holder, I don’t know what will happen. It doesn’t mean you will stay here permanently, from my personal experiences and my personal view. Now I feel psychologically and physically safe.”

Wong said he got started at the Citizenship Day event, and he said the experience really prepared him for moving forward through the citizenship process. He invited those on the fence to come out and try it out.

“They are very nice and they want to help you complete all the stages, why not come?” he said. “I am really thankful to them. After the Citizenship Day, we still got detailed followup and support from Project Citizenship. All the stages, reminders, links, and everything to check everything we needed and solve all our inquiries and questions. I really need to say thank you for this kind of program. It’s very special.”

Wong said when he finally got to the exam portion of the test, he had a very friendly and helpful intake manager, who understood that non-native English speakers are not necessarily familiar with all the colloquialisms, turns of phrase and dialects that native speakers know inherently.

“I got a very, very nice officer who was very supportive,” he said. “He helped me to not be anxious and just take it easy and follow all the steps. He was a very nice and supportive guy for me at least. I would also say he had many friendly remarks and greetings that helped me to relax. Now this was very, very important, but I asked him to ‘speak slowly and let me understand the question.’ He was very patient with me and he was just supportive and professional.”

For more information on Citizenship Day, go to https://gvimes.link/citizenshipday