An identity born of rootlessness

Overseas American

Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics

Gene H. Bell-Villada

University Press of Mississippi: 260 pp., $28

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ONE consequence of the enormous global U.S. presence since World War II has been the large numbers of American youth whose upbringing has taken place, in whole or in part, outside the U.S. mainland, writes author Gene H. Bell-Villada, who is himself one of these children he calls “Third Culture Kids.”

They are unique, Bell-Villada writes in “Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics,” “permanently marked by their upbringing overseas [and they] seldom reach a sense of full integration in American life.”

In this memoir, the author lends witness to the sociology of growing up “away.” His ethno-cultural roots -- or lack thereof, since he believes rootlessness is at the core of the Third Culture Kid experience -- include a “lower-middle-class WASP” father and a Hawaiian mother of Chinese-Filipina-Spanish descent. He was born in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and had a peripatetic upbringing in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Venezuela. Only after high school did Bell-Villada and his younger brother get their first real taste of life in “El Norte”: the snow-decorated paradise they had always been told was the best place on Earth, their true birthright and home.

In 1952, he was a skinny 11-year-old living with Mom and Dad next to a slum outside San Juan, Puerto Rico. He writes of being taunted by neighborhood bullies as “Japones,” of adoring baseball and dancing salsa -- in other words, trying to fit in. English was spoken at home, Spanish elsewhere. His idea of a pure, good-guy American life was gleaned from movies and TV (“I Love Lucy,” ironically) and superhero comic books. By 1955, this tenuous balance had blown apart. After a divorce, his dodgy dad moved to Caracas, Venezuela, with a sexy new wife; the boys, like random bits of shrapnel, landed in the lap of harsh drill instructors at a military academy in Bautista-era Cuba.

A few years later, both boys managed to beat it to Venezuela, but too late to find any sense of belonging. Instead, they went looking for trouble. Their grades slid off the map. Bell-Villada was even jailed briefly by the fear police of the Venezuelan dictator. Dad finally shipped them out again, this time to Mom in another dis-location: New Mexico.

Despite his demurrals, Bell-Villada is a convincing example of an American success story. Thanks to his talent and efforts, as well as the U.S. public university system and the generosity of many teachers, the once poor, quasi-immigrant holds a doctorate from Harvard and tenure at elite Williams College in Massachusetts (where there is plenty of snow). His literary criticism, which includes “Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art,” have earned him a firm place in academia and the reading world beyond.

If this were all there was to “Overseas American,” it would be an interesting but less than gripping memoir -- tantalizing in its glimpses of Cuba on the brink of revolution and UC Berkeley in 1968, as well as its exorcism of family wounds. Happily, the scholar Bell-Villada also delivers an illuminating, wide-angle view of the “Third Culture Kid” phenomenon. He explores the literature, from research papers to fiction. He muses on the difference between the assured place held by traditional European colonials and the shadowy identity of the “colonials” of U.S. empire, as well as the difference between Latin American and North American brands of racism. He contrasts the U.S. military brat with the more privileged offspring of global corporate leaders and the children of drifters or grifters, like himself. With a survivor’s hindsight, he analyzes the pitfalls, disillusionments and stratagems of the long, long road of reintegration in U.S. society.

“I know there are readers ... who’ll sense some occasional frisson of recognition,” he writes. Indeed, this reviewer, a Third World Kid of sorts thanks to a childhood interlude at a Japanese school in Tokyo, felt the shiver page after page, and can attest to the universal validity and honesty of the author’s keen recall and observations. He recounts the wondrous treat of a grainy, subtitled Western at a local cinema, the amazing alien shine of a PX or American club, the sense he has as an adult of “home” being somewhere outside the United States. And above all, he emphasizes the saving importance of language, of the shape-shifting magic of words in all their powerful permutations. It’s easy to empathize with Bell-Villada’s summary of himself today as “less foreign, less marginal, and more of a legitimate participant.... I facilitate, I interpret, happily muddling through in my daily tasks as cultural and linguistic middle-man. My chosen role.”

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Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”