In this way, the split between the me who lived in that apartment and the me who had to learn how to survive outside it was immediate. It had to be. Initially, I suppose, I viewed that split simply as an external divide, straight and pronounced, like the threshold of our front door, marking the point of separation between two distinct realities. On one side was America, on the other was Ghana. And I didn't know how to bring them together, how to make one make sense to, let alone in, the other.

Why do you talk like that? Where are you from? Is that string in your hair? Newness is easy to detect, especially with immigrants. Everything about you is a dead giveaway. And people constantly watch and stare through the scrutinizing lens of curiosity. That was a foreign thing for me, being questioned, being eyed. From top to bottom, the eyes would travel. From top to bottom, taking a silent inventory of the perceived differences: the way I wore my hair wrapped with thread as thick as an undiluted accent, or in small braids intricately woven like a basket atop my head; my clothing, a swirl of bright, festive colors dyed on fabric much too thin for the shivery East Coast climate.

Being black made the transition from Africa to America extremely difficult because it introduced another complex series of boundaries. In a racially divided country, it isn't enough for an immigrant to know how to float in the mainstream. You have to know how to retreat to your margin, where to place your hyphen. You have to know that you are no longer just yourself, you are now an Asian American, a Latin American, an Irish American, or, in my case, a black American. (Only recently has the label become "African American.") At the time of my immigration, the early 1970s, Washington, a predominantly black city, was awash in a wave of Afrocentricity. Dashikis draped brown shoulders, and the black-fisted handle of an Afro pick proudly stuck out of many a back pants pocket. However, despite all the romanticizing and rhetoric about unity and brotherhood, there was a curtain of sheer hostility hanging between black Americans and black Africans.

The black kids I encountered, in and out of school, were the cruelest to me. While other children who were being picked on for whatever trivial or arbitrary reason were called a host of names tailored to their individual inadequacies -- Frog Lips, Peanut Head, Four-Eyes, Brace-Face -- there was no need to create a name for me. You -- you -- you African! Go back to Africa! Who I was seemed to be insult enough; where I was from, a horrific place to which one could be banished as a form of punishment.

The white Americans -- children and adults -- I met attacked me with verbal "kindness," not verbal cruelty. But it was no less hurtful or damaging. Their branding came in the form of adjectives, not nouns -- special, exceptional, different, exotic. These words, which flowed so freely from the lips of teachers, parents and fellow students, were intended to excuse me from my race, to cage me like some zoo animal being domesticated; these words, I realized years later, were intended to absolve those white people from their own racism. I was among the black people to whom many white people were referring when they said, "Some of my best friends . . ." I was complimented for not talking like "them," not acting like "them," not looking like "them" -- "them" being black Americans, the only other physical reflections I had of myself besides my family. But, of course, that wasn't acceptance; it was tolerance.

The one place where I found acceptance was in the company of other immigrants. Together, we concentrated on our similarities, not our differences, because our differences were our similarities. Still, I secretly envied the other foreign kids because I believed that their immigrant experience was somehow more authentic than mine. Unlike me, they were not caught in the racial battlefield of black and white, their ethnicity was visible. Mine invariably faded to black. They spoke languages that were identifiable. Everybody's heard of Spanish, Korean, Chinese, even Arabic. The few people who had heard of Ga and Twi colonially labeled them dialects, not languages. Of all the other immigrants, I got along best with my Spanish-speaking friends. For me, they were the middle ground between America and Africa. So when I grew tired of being pendulous, of going to and fro, I entered their culture and it became my home away from home.

In the second grade, I started taking Spanish lessons at my school, and the connection I already felt to that culture was quickly validated. One morning we were learning the Spanish words for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the foods usually served during those meals. The teacher, a heavy-hipped Nicaraguan woman with arms that looked like rolling pins, held up a card with a picture of a hazel-colored loaf of bread on it. When she flipped the card over to show us its name in Spanish, the word pan was written there in big, bold letters. My jaw dropped in amazement. Pan also meant bread in Twi.

One by one, I discovered other words, found other sources of affirmation, the biggest being the fact that I had the best of approvals, parental permission, to assimilate into that world. My mum was no stranger to it herself. She did the bulk of her shopping at bodegas, rummaging the shelves for suitable replacements for ingredients needed to prepare customary Ghanaian dishes. Often enough, she would take me along when she went to these stores, where stodgy men in blood-smeared aprons would greet us from behind their butcher blocks with smiles and deep-diaphragmed laughter. I felt a sense of freedom in the narrow aisles of those stores, with the tickling smells of hot peppers and the loud chorus of tongues that were kin to my own. I was both outside and inside the split, the distance between home and here.

But it was not a steady resting place. The Latino kids were also in motion, also trying to reach beyond themselves, searching for their own middle ground. And when I traced the pattern of their movements, it led me right back into my skin. Their middle ground, en route to whiteness -- the ultimate immigrant assimilation goal -- was black America. So I followed them there. By then, I had befriended two black American siblings, Karen and Allen, who lived with their mother in an apartment upstairs from mine. Allen (who is now married to a Ghanaian woman) and I were the same age, but I was closer to Karen, who was a year older. She taught me how to jump double Dutch and "snap" back when kids teased me.

"Tell 'em, 'Yo' momma,' " she'd advise.

"Your mama," I'd repeat, rolling my eyes and sucking my teeth the same as she had done.

Allen would always barge into Karen's room when she was in the midst of schooling me and poke fun. "You sound like a ole white girl," he'd say. And, at that time, that's the last thing I wanted, to "sound" white. I wanted to sound like Karen and Allen and all the other black kids at school. Every day when I left their place and went back to my apartment, I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and practice speaking like them. I practiced and practiced until, finally, when I listened to the sound of my voice, I could no longer hear an accent. By then, I was in fourth grade.

When I rid myself of my accent, I suddenly internalized the divide, blurred the lines between continents and allegiances. There was no middle ground anymore, no threshold, no point of distinction between one reality and another. I had strayed so far away from the place I called my home that I could not find my way back. From that point on, every culture I made contact with seeped in to create one fluid geography within me. Yet as much as I imagined that I could claim them all, I still belonged to none of them. I didn't even belong to the one in which my family resided, the one that had once provided me the safety of a home base. As with everywhere else, I became the "other" there, unable to fully expand and unfold the many selves I now had, unable to ever again feel completely whole.

It seems fitting that, of all the cities I could have chosen to live in when I moved from the city where I grew up, I found myself in Los Angeles. This place is the most accurate external portrait of my internal existence. It is a place where everything is subject to change, where even the land is not stable. It is a city of illusions; what you see is not necessarily what is. People come to Los Angeles in search of their future, in spite of their past. Identities and images are created, killed or altered here on a daily basis. Over a hundred languages are spoken; cultures overlap, blend and produce hybrids. There are African American street vendors selling teriyaki burritos, and Mexican cocks in the kitchens of Jamaican restaurants. Far from being idyllic, it is a city at war with itself, a place where xenophobia and self-hatred run rampant. And I have never felt more at peace anywhere else. As the result of a recent incident with my 6-year-old daughter, Korama, I began, for the first time, to accept myself, my history of traversal. I began to create a context for the cross-cultural life that I have led.

For whatever reason, in the course of one of Korama's kindergarten conversations, she let it be known that my favorite television program is "The X-Files." That afternoon when I picked her up from school, she told me about the disclosure. "Oh. Okay, Korama," I said, releasing a slight breath of relief. I was happy to know that she and her friends were now exchanging what I believed was less personal information about their parents. Just a few days before, she had spurted out, in a fountain of giggles, that her classmate's mother wore G-strings; and the day before that I learned of another mother's recent miscarriage.

"Mo-o-m," she whined, "it's not okay. They said you like that show because you're an alien. I tried to tell them that you weren't, but Hugo said I was wrong. He said that you're not from America, and that everyone who's not from here is an alien. Is that true? Are you an alien?" She stared at my head as if antennae would pop out at any time. I wasn't sure how to reply, but with the shrewdness that parenthood teaches you, I tried to figure out a way to answer her question without volunteering too much information that might, ultimately, confuse her. While I was mulling it over, she and I walked side by side in silence. With each step, I felt a distance growing between us. It was a distance much wider than the gap of generations that eventually settles between parents and children. And it was haunting.

For a moment, her stare was as disempowering as those of the American children whom I had encountered as a child, her questions as offensive. I wanted to arm myself against the pain of being reminded that I was "other." I wanted to beg that little girl before me to try, to just try to accept -- if not love -- me for who I was, the way I was, no matter how different that seemed from the way she was. But I knew I didn't have to, because she already did. "Yes," I finally said to Korama, "I am." I explained to her that in addition to creatures from outer space, the word "alien" was used to refer to human beings from other countries. I expected her to be a bit confused, but she didn't appear to be. She nodded, reached out for my hand as we approached the street we had to cross to get to our apartment, and the distance disappeared.

When I tucked her into bed that evening, she raised the subject again. "Mom, will you always be an alien?" she asked. And, again, I tried to find a straightforward, uncomplicated response, this time to a question I had been trying unsuccessfully to answer for over 20 years. "No," I told her. "Not if I become an American." Up until the second I said that, I had never so much as considered becoming a United States citizen. In the belief that I would one day return to the country of my birth, I had never made a commitment to being in the country where I have spent the better part of my life. I had always thought of naturalization as nothing more than a piece of paper one received after passing a test, a series of questions designed to assess one's technical knowledge of the country and the laws by which it is governed. If that's the case, I could live or die without that slip of paper, that change of nationality. It wouldn't make a difference one way or the other. I have lived my life as an alien, an outsider trying to find a way and a place to fit in. And it is only through that experience that I have come to think of myself not as a citizen of one country or another but, rather, of the entire world..

Meri Nana-Ama Danquah is the author of "Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression." This article is excerpted from Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural, to be published this summer by Pantheon Books.