Customer Reviews

Hidden Immigrants: Legacies of Growing Up Abroad (West and the Wider World Series, Vol 11)

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Through personal interviews with well-chosen 13 subjects, Linda Bell gets to explore in some depth the strange experience of growing up American overseas, and then of having to readjust to life in the States after coming "home." Her interviewees range from age 29 through late 50s, and they come alive in these pages. Those of us who have had analogous upbringings will feel shocks of sympathetic recognition as we read the life stories of these adult "Third Culture Kids." Such familiar issues as "Who I Was, When," and "Living on the Surface," and "Why Do I Feel So migratory?" (all of them titles of chapters) spring vividly to life here. Issues of language inevitably crop up. And the absence, among these subjects, of any sense of attachment to a landscape came as a new insight to this reader. As Linda Bell herself says of her subjects, "they didn't seem to take much notice of where they were living... It just didn't come up as a topic. Also, not one of the voices seems really attached to the geography where they find themselves now." This is a fresh and highly readable addition to a growing literature on the still scarcely acknowledged matter of being raised American in foreign lands and how it can affect one's psyche and personality.

This is useful for parents living overseas and wishing to know how 'Third Culture Kids' struggle to re-enter their 'home' countries after being raised overseas. It can also provide useful background reading for ethnographic researchers as Bell provides extracts from original transcripts. Bell is clear that she is a journalist and not an academic, so do not expect in- depth analysis drawing on lots of other sources. However, the extracts are very effectively compiled to demonstrate common trends.
The interviewees are all Americans.