CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — As a boy in a mud-hut village in China, he befriended a company of Marines and later suffered under the Communists because of it.
Now, after an odyssey that lasted 55 years, Charlie Two Shoes, as the Marines called him, is about to become a U.S. citizen.
"I always believed this day would come," 66-year-old Tsui Chi Hsii said in an interview at the Chapel Hill restaurant he owns. "No matter how many hurdles I had to cross, I always believed victory was possible."
Sixty of Tsui's Marine buddies from Love Company have been invited to attend today's citizenship ceremony. The 5-foot-2 Tsui plans to wear the Marine pants the leathernecks gave him in China in 1946 when he was a boy.
"I don't know how many Americans would have sacrificed themselves like Charlie did," said Jack Hutchins of Hazel Green, Ky., a former Love Company Marine. "He was true to himself, true to the Corps and true to his beliefs."
Tsui's journey began in Chukechuang, the village where he was born.
After World War II, Marines who had fought the Japanese were shipped to China as the Communists and Nationalists resumed their civil war. Some were assigned to protect an air base near Tsui's home.
One day in 1945, Tsui brought the men of Love Company, 4th Marines, 1st Marine Division kindling for their fires.
"The thing I most remember about him was his bright, smiling eyes," said Hutchins, who befriended the tiny, malnourished child. "He was a giver. He was loyal and attentive and dedicated and honest."
The Marines called him Charlie Two Shoes because they couldn't pronounce his name. They taught him English, dressed him in a cut-down khaki uniform and taught him how to spit-shine his shoes. He swapped food and firewood every day for the Marines' K-rations.
When the Marines left for Tsingtao several miles away, the boy's father let Tsui go along.
"For his father, it meant there was one less mouth to feed," said David Perlmutt, co-author of the book "Charlie Two Shoes and the Marines of Love Company."
The Marines gave him a bunk in their barracks and sent him to a Catholic missionary school. He studied English, became a Christian and began setting his sights on becoming an American citizen. Then the Marines shipped out in 1949, as Mao Zedong's Communist army neared victory over the Nationalist forces.
Don Sexton, another former Love Company Marine, still gets choked up when he recalls young Tsui saluting the Marines from the dock.
A grueling loyalty test began for Tsui. The Communists imprisoned him for seven years when he refused to renounce the United States and the Marine Corps. He spent 10 more years under house arrest.
When China-U.S. relations began to thaw in the 1970s, Tsui wrote to several Marines' addresses he had memorized nearly three decades earlier.
In 1983, with the help of former Marines, he arrived in the United States, found a place to live and work. From there, he built a successful career.
Tsui said the values he learned from the Marines and at the missionary school — loyalty, honor, honesty and love for his fellow man — helped him prevail in his struggle to leave China and become a U.S. citizen.
"These virtues are things that never fade," he said. "As you get older, they get stronger."