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I followed my stepfather in his travels as a diplomat.
And I have been an immigrant in the United States for more than 30 years.
Being chronically uprooted has some advantages.
I look Chilean and I dream, cook, make love, and write in Spanish.
Make love: it would be ridiculous panting in English.
My lover doesnt speak a word of Spanish.
I have a lover at 76, you wouldnt believe, yeah.
Hes a brave man.
As a stranger, I dont take anything for granted.
I observe and listen carefully.
I ask questions and I question everything.
I draw on other peoples lives, especially the strong and passionate women that I meet everywhere.
Im not afraid of life either.
I refuse to live in fear and let alone to vote in fear.
Its a time of violence and poverty for many.
Remember the little 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body the ocean washed up onto a beach in Turkey in 2015?
His name was Alan Kurdi.
He could have been your son or my grandson.
Alan Kurdi symbolized the plight of millions of desperate people.
I write to preserve memory against the erosion of oblivion and to bring people together.
I believe in the power of stories.
Because we realize that the similarities that bring us together are many more than the differences that separate us.
I also write to understand.
What is writing after all but an attempt to sort out the confusion of life.
For those without roots in a place, memory is essential to maintain a sense of continuity.
Nobody witnesses the length of our lives, we need to remember.
And what would a writer do without an acute sense of the past, without an obsession with memory?
I dont know how much of my memory is actual fact and how much I have invented.
Maybe I remember what never happened.
Memory is subjective, it is conditioned by emotion and belief.
Our own story is also subjective.
We choose what to highlight and what to ignore or forget.
We go for the adjectives to describe our journey and in doing so we create our own legend.
I have created for myself the bigger than life legend, probably to compensate for my short stature.
In this land, everybody descends from someone who came from another place.
It means that maybe its time to plant my roots and relax.
Maybe I have found a place where I can belong.
Maybe Im not going anywhere anymore.
