{"id":39664,"date":"2015-01-24T20:22:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-24T20:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39664"},"modified":"2015-01-25T01:47:22","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T01:47:22","slug":"tck-talent-gene-bell-villada-literary-critic-latin-americanist-novelist-translator-and-tck-memoirist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39664","title":{"rendered":"TCK TALENT: Gene Bell-Villada, literary critic, Latin Americanist, novelist, translator and TCK memoirist"},"content":{"rendered":"

TCK TALENT: Gene Bell-Villada, literary critic, Latin Americanist, novelist, translator and TCK memoirist<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Displaced Nation: A home for international creatives<\/a>
\n2015-01-21<\/p>\n

Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nProfessor Gene Bell-Villada (own photo)<\/small><\/p>\n

Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang is here with her first column of 2015. For those who haven\u2019t been following: she is building up quite a collection of stories about Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) who work in creative fields. Lisa herself is a prime example. A Guatemalan-American of Chinese-Spanish-Irish-French-German-English descent, she has developed her own one-woman show about growing up as a TCK, which is receiving rave reviews wherever it goes.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014ML Awanohara<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Happy New Year, readers! Today I\u2019m honored to be interviewing Gene Bell-Villada<\/a>, author of the Third Culture Kid<\/a> memoir Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics<\/em><\/a> and co-editor of my first published essay in the TCK\/global-nomad anthology: Writing Out of Limbo<\/em>. Gene grew up in Latin America and \u201crepatriated\u201d to the USA for college and beyond; he is a Professor of Romance Languages (Spanish), Latin American Literature, and Modernism at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is also a published writer of fiction and nonfiction.<\/p>\n

Welcome to The Displaced Nation<\/em>, Gene. Like me, you\u2019re an Adult Third Culture Kid of mixed heritage. Since you were born in Haiti<\/a> and grew up in Puerto Rico<\/a>, Cuba<\/a>, and Venezuela<\/a> as the son of an Asian-Polynesian mother from Hawaii<\/a> and a WASP<\/a> father from Kansas<\/a>, your identity development was complex and nuanced, as you make clear in your memoir. Can you tell us how you identify yourself these days?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like the title of my memoir, I identify myself as an Overseas American, of mixed WASP and Chinese-Filipino-Hawaiian ethnicity, with a Caribbean-Hispanic upbringing. I wrote my memoir in great measure to disentangle and explain that background\u2014for myself and others! More broadly, in my middle 20s, it dawned on me that, by default, I happened to be a cosmopolitan, and that I couldn\u2019t feel \u201clocal\u201d even if I wished to. And so, I set out to make the best of that cosmopolitanism and build on it…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TCK TALENT: Gene Bell-Villada, literary critic, Latin Americanist, novelist, translator and TCK memoirist The Displaced Nation: A home for international creatives 2015-01-21 Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang Professor Gene Bell-Villada (own photo) Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang is here with her first column of 2015. For those who haven\u2019t been following: she is building up quite a collection of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,395,21,13743,8,20],"tags":[12423,19144,19143,11637,15006,15005],"class_list":["post-39664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-latincarib","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-elizabeth-liang","tag-gene-bell-villada","tag-gene-h-bell-villada","tag-lisa-liang","tag-the-displaced-nation","tag-the-displaced-nation-a-home-for-international-creatives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}