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When I complained to the other boys about this habit, she ejected me for rudeness. After supper, we were allowed to watch an hour of “telly” in the living room, with our hosts in attendance. Our meals ran to fried eggs and ham, liver and mash, and beans on toast.

The house had no central heat, and to stay warm at night we had to feed shilling coins into tiny heaters in our bedrooms. On Friday evenings, if we were allowed out, we’d get fish-and-chips and go to the movies. We were all foreigners, and therefore misfits, and we soon fell in together. My housemates were a doughy white Rhodesian and a tall boy from Hong Kong. I was enrolled in an academy and set up in a rooming house run by an elderly couple. Michelle, who is four years older than I, had already left home-first living on the Kenyan island of Lamu and then going to study in Nice.īy the time my parents left, I had been kicked out of school in Lyme Regis (wild and undisciplined, the headmaster said) and sent to finish preparing for my A-level exams in the nearby city of Exeter. My mother secured a teaching position at the University of Florida in Gainesville, invited by the Southern-gothic novelist Harry Crews, and brought along my sisters Tina and Mei Shan. At the end of the school year, my father loaded my brother Scott into a VW van and set off overland for India.

To the locals, we were the exotics, a multiracial American family, and I was a boy who acknowledged no rules.įor my family, this period of stasis didn’t last long. Everything was tiny, from the cars to the terrace houses where people lived, and the English had pale bodies, gray teeth, and odd habits: even the children drank tea. Lyme Regis was famous for its cliffs and fossils, and for being the site of the nineteenth-century drama that unfolds in John Fowles’s novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” To me, it felt like a model-train set. My mother chose our next destination, the pretty Victorian town of Lyme Regis, on the English coast. My younger brother, Scott, and I were born in California, between overseas postings. Tina was adopted during the El Salvador years and Mei Shan in Taiwan. My sister Michelle was born in Haiti, where she got inoculations from the Embassy’s recommended physician-François Duvalier, the future Papa Doc. Along the way, they’d assembled a family. On Foreign Service assignments, the two had lived in Trinidad, Haiti, El Salvador, South Korea, and Colombia before landing in Taiwan and Indonesia. My mother-a children’s author who’d published her first book at twenty-eight-had put her work aside to follow him.

My father had always been a wanderer, the kind of person who’d happily get from one place to another by taking a freighter. My father took early retirement from his Foreign Service job-thinking, he often said later, that he needed to “save me.” But he and my mother were also trying to save their marriage, which had become increasingly strained during twenty years of moving around the world. After that, my parents decided to move again, and began looking for a calmer place to live. I got into more trouble as I entered high school, mostly for drugs I did acid and pot, like everyone else, but a girl once shot me up with heroin before archery class. My parents pointed out that I hadn’t yet finished middle school. I noted that a Swiss adventurer had passed through Monrovia on his way to crossing the Sahara by camel and had invited me to join him. I spent most of it ducking my chaperons to travel into the Liberian wilderness and around East Africa, and when the time was up I told my parents that I didn’t want to leave. I ran away from home several times, and so my mother and father devised a solution for my restlessness: they sent me to stay for a year with an aunt and uncle in Liberia. While I was out selling “I Have a Dream” stickers in King’s memory to support the Poor People’s Campaign, a neighbor sicced his dogs on me. During our time there, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated-one of the few times I saw my parents cry. We had stayed in Northern Virginia for part of the previous year, between stints in Taiwan and Indonesia. I hated Reston, and hated living in the United States. agents and Foreign Service officers like my father could raise their families. It was a planned community near Washington, D.C.-a suburban utopia where C.I.A. When I was twelve years old, in 1969, my family moved to Reston, Virginia.

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