Americans Discovering Cultural Roots

The summer when I was fifteen, my family took six-week trip visiting extended family in China and Taiwan, and my parents’ friends in Japan. It was the first time I had ever left America, and I am scowling in almost every single photo taken during that trip. I was not used to the dust, the dirt, or the stares, especially in more rural parts of China. Though my family is 100% Asian, we looked completely different from the Chinese in China. We were American in our clothes, our smells, our hairstyles, our shoes, our bags, the way we talked, and even the way we walked. We ate Asian food non-stop, and by the end of the trip, I was longing for a bite of a real American burger.

I remember wanting desperately to go home to America many, many times, when touring the royal palaces of Kyoto, or traveling down the muddy Yangtze River, or climbing the precarious, worn-down steps of the Great Wall. Yet looking back, I realize now how that experience has forced me to grow emotionally and mentally, and I am forever thankful to my parents for giving me while I was a teenager an eye-opening view of another part of the world.

While researching Stranger in a Strange Land multicultural children's novels, I was especially interested in stories with this same feeling I had at age fifteen. But again they are few and far between.

In Habibi, a novel about Liyana, a biracial American girl, moving from St. Louis, Missouri, to Jerusalem, the land where her father was born, author and poet Naomi Shihab Nye captures this feeling:

"Maybe the hardest thing about moving overseas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together with little pieces."

Finding Naomi Leon by Pam Munoz Ryan is about a half Mexican, half white fifth grader living with her disabled brother Owen, and her Grams. When Naomi's irresponsible mother Skyla arrives to reunite with her children, Grams takes Naomi and Owen from California to Oaxaca, Mexico, to find their father. Note the crossing of the border occurs late this storyline. But when they cross, there are fun moments like Naomi's list of "Regular and Everyday Worries about Mexico."

Why does the Coqui Sing? by Barbara Garland Polikoff features another biracial protagonist, half Italian, half Puerto Rican. When thirteen year old Luz moves from Chicago, Illinois, to Puerto Rico, she wonders, "How can home be a place I've never been?"

Monsoon Summer by Mitali Perkins is about a half white, half Indian, all-American teen Jasmine (Jazz for short) reluctantly traveling with her family to Pune, India, with her mother for the monsoon season.

Unlike the American Girl Educated Abroad, these girls travel with their families, which provide the social structure and protection similar to that given by boarding schools. But I think the journey for self discovery is more personal because of the link between the foreign land and family origins.

Also, why are all these protagonists biracial? There are tons of ethnic Americans who have never traveled to the country of their parents or ancestors. I'm searching for their first time abroad stories, too. And boy stories!