The Foreign Service Journal, November 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2022 57 outside of my family, want to read about me? They are easy questions to ask, but you may struggle to come up with answers that will justify the time, effort, and psychic anguish that writing your own story will entail. How did I do it? I started with the draft I hurriedly typed in the summer of 1970 after my return from Bangalore, India. It was raw but contained the passion and emotion of an experience that was still fresh in my mind. I didn’t do much with that draft. My parents and friends were never allowed to read it. The storage box of paper quickly found a shady space in my bookcase and then followed me, unopened, for the next 40 or so years as I moved fromCalifornia to the East Coast and through four different overseas posts. When I first retired, in 2005, I thought about resur- recting the manuscript but had yet to find the creative spark needed for a rewrite. July 2011 provided that spark. I was return- ing to India on temporary duty as USAID direc- tor. As I emerged from the customs hall at Indira Gandhi Airport on that hot Delhi night, the assault of the sights and smells on my senses brought me back to that earlier India experience, a moment both surprising and intense. It was now time to revisit the fading pages of my 1970 manuscript. After returning from India, I pulled my manuscript from the storage box but didn’t begin writing right away. Instead, I read two useful manuals about memoir writing: The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick and Writing About Your Life by William Zinsser. There are many useful guides to writing memoirs, but these two were the ones that helped me the most. Both guides laid out the basic principles of memoir writing, chief among them: Don’t write a travelogue. Then, I asked myself the three questions cited earlier. I knew my family would be interested in my experience living in South India in the late 1960s, but would it appeal to a broader audience? Would writing it for more mass appeal contribute to a cause that I feel passionately about—namely, study abroad and cross- cultural education? Did I have the discipline to finish the book? It tookmy return to India in 2011 to find the answers to those questions that had eludedme for four decades. A ghat on the Ganges River in Varanasi, December 1969. The holy city along the sacred river has nearly 100 such flights of riverfront steps, where religious rituals are regularly performed. Inset: An elderly Rajasthani man in Hyderabad, February 1970. FRANKYOUNG FRANKYOUNG The author’s Indian family on the veranda of their home in Visweswarapuram, a neighborhood in Bangalore, 1969.