When I was twelve years old, in , my family moved to Reston, Virginia. It was a planned community near Washington, D. I hated Reston, and hated living in the United States. We had stayed in Northern Virginia for part of the previous year, between stints in Taiwan and Indonesia. During our time there, Martin Luther King, Jr. 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.
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. Crestfallen, I went back home. 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.
Several kids I knew died from overdoses. After that, my parents decided to move again, and began looking for a calmer place to live. My younger brother, Scott, and I were born in California, between overseas postings. My mother chose our next destination, the pretty Victorian town of Lyme Regis, on the English coast. 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.
To the locals, we were the exotics, a multiracial American family, and I was a boy who acknowledged no rules. At the end of the school year, my father loaded my brother Scott into a VW van and set off overland for India. 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. Michelle, who is four years older than I, had already left homeβfirst living on the Kenyan island of Lamu and then going to study in Nice.
By 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. I was enrolled in an academy and set up in a rooming house run by an elderly couple. My housemates were a doughy white Rhodesian and a tall boy from Hong Kong. We were all foreigners, and therefore misfits, and we soon fell in together. Otherwise, we kept to a dull routine. The house had no central heat, and to stay warm at night we had to feed shilling coins into tiny heaters in our bedrooms.
