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elsewhere.

    One day late in the summer, my friend Kim, from my sorority, called the Moraira house. She was traveling around Europe on a Eurail Pass; could I meet her in Valencia? I couldn’t, nor could she come down to Moraira. Though I’d see her in the fall, this missed connection, and consciousness of her roving freedom, tugged at me. It reminded me of my own captivity. I formed wild plans—
fantasies with no hope of success—to invite Pepe and catch a train, to the South of France or to Italy.
    I took the train from Valencia back to Madrid, speeding through artichoke fields to catch my flight, with new confidence: I knew my way around here. But it was with a sense of loss, because I didn’t want to go back to Seattle and school. I didn’t want to stay in Moraira, either. I wanted to travel. Pepe would soon transform in my mind to a part of the Costa Blanca landscape, intrinsic to white stucco, fried fish, and the particular blue of the water. But a desire had been whetted by my summer in Spain, and left unfulfilled.

chapter three
    ON ROOTS
    W hen I was five, I thought I was Chinese. My mother and father were WASPs who had migrated to Vancouver from Oregon and New York, respectively. But my mother had told me that all Chinese people had black hair, and since my father had black hair, I made the natural assumption of someone who didn’t yet have a strong grasp of “if-then” reasoning. My skeptical first-grade teacher was the one who figured out my logical error and set me straight.
    Then I thought for a while that my father must be Jewish because he made my brother and me watch the PBS Holocaust documentary whenever it aired, with its piles of emaciated bodies. I thought this implied some sort of identification with the victims. But when I asked my father about Hanukkah—which sounded like a good opportunity for present-getting—he said that this wasn’t our religion.
    So I wasn’t Chinese or Jewish. I knew kids who went to Croatian, Swedish, and Korean community centers, and to mosques and temples, but there didn’t seem to be any such institutions for Anglo-Americans.
    As I grew up I had trouble identifying with Vancouver, too. While dramatically beautiful when the clouds parted, with its backdrop of snow-topped peaks, it always felt a little transient to me, like
its residents were all in the process of moving on to somewhere like Srinagar or Toronto. The whole metropolis had sprung up quickly in historical terms, beginning in the late 1800s, atop a blank slate of evergreens and a handful of native Squamish and Musqueam people. Later I’d be drawn to cities with ancient underpinnings, like London and Damascus.
    Nationality wasn’t much help either. I always had two: American from having been born to U.S. citizens, and Canadian from having been born in Canada. We went south to visit my mother’s family, up and down the I-5, back and forth over the border. As binationalism goes, there are many more awkward combinations: the dual Iranian-American citizen, the German-Turk. Even if you’re from two countries that are much alike, though, binationalism affects your perception of the world. In the back of your mind you always know there’s another option.
    Of course, everyone has roots. If I trolled back a few generations, I’d find Slovaks and Scots, along with Europeans who had landed in New England hundreds of years back. And like many citizens of immigrant nations, I had a smorgasbord of identities from which to pick. I could make the story up.

chapter four
    ON COMING AND GOING
    P assing like ships in the night”: That’s what my mother said about Graham and me, before I knew anything about actual ships passing in the actual night. We thought we had much more to go on. When I returned from Spain, we overlapped by a couple of weeks in Vancouver and were able to spend entire evenings together. In any case, who said that time spent