Writing America

My first book - and what comes next

Tomorrow marks three years since my debut book Drifts was published by Footnote Press. Drifts is about growing up as an American kid overseas. By the time I was eighteen I’d lived on four continents, visited more than forty countries, and had my very own gas mask I once had to lug to elementary school in case of chemical weapons attacks.

I did do some of my growing up in America: I took my first steps in Texas, went to first grade in Virginia, lost my first tooth in California, and had my first kiss in Massachusetts. But much of my childhood was spent overseas where I was what is known as a third-culture kid, someone who spends a large part of their childhood outside their home country.

A common trait among third-culture kids is their attachment to the places they grew up even though they aren’t from there. They pick up languages, habits, and cultural touchstones that are foreign. This means moving back home can be a shock. The things you do or say are out of place in ways other kids notice. They ask “where are you from?” and it brings a flicker of confusion: do you say where you were born even though that is not your nationality, or do you say your nationality even if you never lived there, or do you say where you are currently living or where you lived the longest?

Well-meaning parents and teachers and guidance counselors are often confused by a TCK’s attachment to these foreign places: you aren’t from there, so why do you feel so strongly?

But we do feel strongly. That’s partly why I wrote Drifts; to to tell myself it would be okay if all I ever felt was adrift.

But once Drifts was out something strange happened.

That turbulent part of me felt settled. I had thought it never would or even could but it did. I was an American who was shaped by my childhood years overseas and it didn’t need to make sense to anyone else, it was what it was.

And then something even stranger happened. I noticed I was American.

I’d always known the facts, of course: my English forbears settled America in the 1600s, America was the only passport I ever had, the only place I could honestly call my own, the place all of my relatives lived, and the only honest answer I could give to the question: where is home?

So what I mean when I say I noticed I was American is that I started to notice just how deep that went. For years I’d only seen the ways my globe-trotting upbringing left me not fitting in, but now I saw all the ways I did. Being American shaped everything: the way I spoke, the education I’d had, the books I read, the music I listened to, the movies I watched, the way I dressed, the way I thought about family, government, property rights, free speech, faith, individual liberty, social trust, shared norms - all the big and small things that make a people a people.

The third-culture kid liminality I spent years writing about was real, but now I could see that it amounted to window-dressing in comparison to architecture. It might sound odd to anyone who didn’t grow up that way, but it’s profound to feel rootless all your life and then one day realize your roots have been there all along.

The Question Now

In Drifts, I also wrote about the transcultural history of the Arabian Gulf, where I spent many of my third-culture kid years. The Gulf is a place of robust national identities and strict immigration laws; there is no threat from open borders or the undermining of cohesive cultures. So writing about the spaces along the margins where there is confluential frisson felt rewarding.

But when I look at America, I see something different.

In America the center does not hold in the same way. The country no longer defines itself as the homeland of a distinct people but by abstract principles open to the world. Years of bad immigration policy have demographically reshaped the nation in a single lifetime. Immigrants retain the salient cultural traits of their homeland for generations, meaning they make America more like the nations they left, while the myth of the proposition nation and the enforced celebration of multiculturalism further erodes cohesion. As someone who grew up along the borders of other cultures, I can see that in America we’ve tried to make the edge the center, which only leads to chaos.

My years overseas also gave me experience with immigration systems and cultural clashes, so I know that in most countries what is happening in America today would be described as hazardous. Which is why it feels gaslighting to watch American politicians frame it as an unquestionable positive despite its well-known drawbacks.

My years overseas also taught me what it feels like to be a foreigner, something I equate to being a guest in someone’s home. And as a guest I never expect the same rights and privileges as citizens, I never expect to get welfare or vote or run for office or protest or demand citizenship. What’s more, the time I spend in other countries can be important to me personally without me wanting to tell the citizens that their identity is invalid or their history is illegitimate or that their culture doesn’t exist or that it must change its definition to include me.

But this is what I see in America. And it is because of this that the way I write about America has to be different.

My writing over the years is a testament to how much I appreciate cultural confluence but confluence depends on coherence. So when writing about America I am less interested in the margins than in the mythic strata beneath the surface, the inherited stories and loyalties we are now taught to treat as embarrassing or problematic or obsolete.

I want to sink my hands into the soil and write from there.

It is in that soil that all of my ancestors for nearly four hundred years are buried. These ancestors of mine who poured over the Appalachian mountains, pushing America’s frontier across a wild continent. My ancestors who reached Texas before it was a state. My father who has the Texas flag tattooed on his arm. My grandmother who drove a school bus and my great-grandmother who picked cotton and baked pies at a café. My great-grandfather, a postman for forty years, who went to college to get his degree at seventy years old. My grandfather who flew “the Hump” in World War 2 and my great-uncle who followed Patton through Europe and came back forever changed. My ancestor who fought at Gettysburg and my ancestor who was at Valley Forge with George Washington.

I know it is possible to love a country that isn’t yours by heritage, that you can learn its rhythms and feel at home beneath its sky. But I also know that love is not the same as seeing your blood knit into centuries of its history.

And despite what we’ve been told, America is not a notion, it is a nation. To deny that fact is metaphysical vandalism. This doesn’t mean newcomers can’t be welcomed into the fold, but it does mean you cannot endlessly erode a building’s foundation and expect that building to remain standing.

America has a telos, a bone-deep temperament that cohered out of frontier conditions, Protestant metaphysics, violence, risk, and confidence in action. America is not its abstract ideals but its people. Their rugged individualism and moral boldness and their temerity to dream of the stars and then go there. And it remains, this true America, coherent and vast, and I want to write about it. I want to write about its mythic truth, a truth that is embodied and distinct and carried in a history that asks something of us.

The question now is how will we answer.