Home Bound An Uprooted Daughter's Reflections on Belonging

A cross between Memorial Drive and Crying in H-Mart, Vanessa A. Bee defies memoir conventions in Home Bound, a multi-faceted, globe-spanning exploration of identity, family, belonging, and the meaning of home. Born in Cameroon and adopted by her aunt and her aunt’s white French husband, Vanessa A. Bee grew up in a village in France where her adoptive father worked in a Renault factory. After her parents divorced, Vanessa was uprooted time and again due to her adoptive mother's changing circumstances, experiencing housing insecurity both in France and the UK. As a teen she immigrates to Reno, Nevada, on the cusp of the housing crisis. Eventually, after graduating from Harvard Law School and navigating a career in economic justice, Vanessa makes a home for herself in Washington, DC. Vanessa’s adoptive, multiracial, multilingual, multinational, and transcontinental upbringing has made her grapple for years with foundational questions such as: What is home? Is it the country we’re born in, the body we possess, or the name we were given and that identifies us? Is it the house we remember most fondly, the social status assigned to us, or the ideology we forge? What defines us and makes us uniquely who we are? Organized around her own dictionary-style definitions of the word “home,” Vanessa tackles these timeless questions thematically and unpacks the many layers that contribute to and condition our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world.