She Was Born as Collateral So Her Father Would Return to China. She Became American.

In a little village in rural China, a mother waited to give birth with almost no medical guidance. As Meservey put it, her mother "didn't even know whether I would come out a boy or a girl or in six months or 12 months."

The baby who emerged was Lulu Cheng Meservey, now the founder of the communications firm Rostra. Her father, an astrophysicist who studies stars and distant galaxies, had just been sent to Germany to earn his doctorate.

At the time, far more Chinese citizens wanted to leave China than were allowed to go. The condition for her father's trip was that his wife and newborn daughter remain in China to ensure he would come back.

This is the story of how that collateral became an American, by way of three other countries. After starting life in a village with little prenatal care, Meservey would live in China, Germany, Norway, and Canada before she ever reached the United States, where she later became a citizen.

The plan did not hold. Instead of remaining in China, Meservey and her mother joined him in Heidelberg, where he was earning his doctorate. From there, the family kept moving from university to university, following observatory jobs.

One stop was the University of Oslo. There, Meservey went to public school and spent part of her childhood, absorbing the language and the culture. "I just became a little bit Norwegian," she said.

From Europe, the family moved to Canada, where becoming Canadian citizens felt exciting and welcoming. Then came what she called the "grand slam, big dream," the United States.

Meservey came to the United States for college and never left. A few years ago, during the first Trump administration, she naturalized as an American citizen. It was a dream she said she inherited from her father, who would have tried to move to the U.S. if he had not gone to Germany.