BY THE LAKE OF SLEEPING CHILDREN: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border
By Luis Alberto Urrea
Anchor. 187 pp. Paperback, $11

TALES OF TWO CITIES: A Persian Memoir
By Abbas Milani
Mage Publishers, 1032 29th St. NW, Washington, DC 20007. 263 pp.

AMONG THE WHITE MOON FACES: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
By Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Feminist Press. 232 pp. $22.95

Go to the First Chapter of "Among the White Moon Faces"

Go to Chapter One

Four Roads to America

"We tell stories to bind us to a spot," writes Shirley Geok-lin Lim. One such story is that of Nicolas and Carol Cordoba, who found each other in a federal prison in New York. He had hidden in a submerged air pocket above the rudder of an oil tanker just before sailing from Colombia. After the ship arrived in New York, police searched it and discovered both Cordoba and bags of cocaine in the chamber. Cordoba insisted he was only a stowaway and not a smuggler, but he was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. There he took an English course, taught by "Miss Carol."

Much of her book is an overly dramatized account of Cordoba's dangerous trip and a tediously long report on his trial. We learn little about him. His dream was to come here, make money and return rich to Colombia. Economic success in America, Cordoba had hoped, would be a way to bind him to family and friends at home.

His English teacher was also searching for a dream. The lonely "Miss Carol" saw herself as "short," "overweight," "fifty-one years old" and the "mother of three sons in their twenties" -- the same age as Nicolas. One day, Nicolas, who looked "like Eddie Murphy," told her that he loved her. The newfound love inspired Carol to reinvent herself by losing 45 pounds and purchasing "a whole new wardrobe to show off [her] new figure." She married Nicolas and followed him from prison to prison. Like a Monday-night movie for television, the story ends with them waiting to be together in Colombia after his release from prison and his deportation.

Like Nicolas Cordoba, the people in Luis Alberto Urrea's sensitively written book are also outsiders: They gaze at America not from a prison but from the garbage dumps of Tijuana. Clearly visible are luxurious condominiums and houses with swimming pools, just on the other side of the border. The politically constructed divide maps the geography of Urrea's bifurcated identity: his Mexican father and American mother, his birth in Tijuana, and his growing up in San Diego. "My father raised me to be 100 percent Mexican, often refusing to speak English to me, tirelessly patrolling the borders of my language . . . And my mother raised me to be 100 percent American: she never spoke Spanish . . . If, as some have suggested lately, I a.m. some sort of 'voice of the border,' it is because the border runs down the middle of me. I have a barbed-wire fence neatly bisecting my heart."

From his perspective, Urrea movingly retells the stories of the people tied together in the dumps. Once a man caught him writing. "Wait a minute," he said. "You're writing about us . . . Good! You write it down . . . Because I live in the garbage, and I'll die in the garbage, and I'll be buried in the garbage. And nobody will ever know that I lived. So tell them about me."

Urrea's stories are painfully realistic. Describing how boys would stone donkeys to death for sport and how the people of the dumps were "crushingly poor," Urrea observes: "And poverty . . . ennobles no one." But the stories turn out to reveal a greater complexity and deeper humanity; one of them undermines Urrea's generalization. Eduardo had been accidentally crushed underneath a garbage truck. His horrific death knotted the people into a community: They collected money, bought Eduardo a suit, washed his face, made a coffin from particle board and gave him a proper burial with candles. And thanks to Urrea, we know that Eduardo lived.

In his Tales of Two Cities, Abbas Milani tells how he struggled to loosen himself from the entanglements of Tehran under the Shah and then under the Ayatollah Khomeini. Milani had left his upper-class family for an education in the United States; after completing his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1974, he returned to Tehran, where he taught at the National University. He married and thought he would lead a settled family life. But in 1977 he was charged with political crimes and was imprisoned. When freed, he found the streets of Tehran exploding in swirling protests instigated by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Milani witnessed the increasing repressiveness of the Islamic Republic as professors were forced to conform to the rigid ideas of the new order or be fired. Memories of his experiences abroad intruded: "My years in America had taught me the values of self-assertion as a cardinal element of individuality and engraved in me a respect for the sanctity of individual corporeal existence and pleasure." In 1986, Milani returned to America.

But as a settler rather than a sojourning student, Milani saw U.S. society differently. This time he noticed how intolerant and prejudiced many Americans were toward Iranians, stereotyping them as "scraggly bearded, clench-fisted zealots." As an exile, Milani also realized how fastened he still was to the Persian community and culture he had left in Iran. "What I once prized as the mobility of American life now seemed the source of rootlessness. The friendliness of Americans in their first encounters, their cheerful faces, now often seemed to hide lives of loneliness."

Like Milani, Shirley Geok-lin Lim came to America as a student. Her fascinating autobiography reads like a novel, with interesting stories stitched into the quilt of her life. Born into a Chinese family in the British colony of Malaysia in 1944, she was abandoned by her mother at the age of 8, beaten by her father and forced to live with her stepmother, who was the 17-year-old daughter of her father's servant. A convent school offered the lonely girl a place to moor herself as she discovered her sexuality. Bright, articulate and arrogant, she entered the university, where she intensely pursued her passions for knowledge and men. After a tryst in a hotel room with a professor, an "English man, married with two children," Lim dismissed the suggestion that it was sexual harassment. "I felt a sense of power, that unwittingly I had been able to reduce this superior man to frantic begging."

Meanwhile, Lim watched Malaysia secure its independence from British rule in 1957. But this freedom unleashed ethnic separatism and murderous anti-Chinese riots. For her, Malaysian ascendancy meant "one group's empowerment" leading to "another's oppression." Her hope for the creation of a multicultural society dashed, she was beckoned to America by a Fulbright fellowship.

However, Lim quickly discovered that our country was not the promised land, at least not for Asians. She was perceived as a "foreigner" simply because she did not look like an "American." There were others who looked like her and who were U.S. citizens; but they, too, were regarded as strangers. Lim realized that blacks and Puerto Ricans were similarly excluded. All of them were not "white European."

Lim's stay here became permanent with her marriage to an American, the birth of a child and a university appointment. But she remained tethered to childhood memories of Malaysia -- her father's grave on a Malacca knoll overlooking green paddy fields and her family knitted together through jealousies and hardships. Like Milani, however, Lim experienced an ambivalence that reflected a larger cultural conflict between being an individual and belonging to a community. "I began to see that I needed to be useful to someone else other than myself," she finally decided. "What had preserved me in Malaysia, the struggle for an individual self against the cannibalism of familial, ethnic, and communal law, was exactly what was pickling me in isolation in the United States."

Though our four storytellers take us down different paths, they lead us to ponder a common question: What are "the mystic chords of memory" that bind all of us as Americans to this spot called the United States? Joining what Walt Whitman called the "varied carols" of America, they share stories that rebel against the ethnocentricisms that strap the expansiveness of the human spirit. They urge us to reach for the sometimes conflicted but always enriching multiplicity contained within each of our selves and to imagine a world without borders.

Ronald Takaki teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of "A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America."