Quotes from Where I Belong:

“If you want to live in foreign parts, you should be a missionary. That’s what we wanted for you. God gave you this miraculous way with languages—that none of us ever had or even thought about. That’s why we let you take that scholarship and leave us to go to college.”

And the son answers his father:

“I never felt called to be a missionary.” The words escaped, propelled by frustration that found its outlet. “That was your dream, not mine.”

A young man raised in the north Georgia mountains accepts a career as a U.S. diplomat—about as far away from his upbringing as his father could imagine. A career, his father believes, that would surely involve becoming “a fancy pants who talks all uppish and probably drinks a lot—well, things like that don’t belong to people like us.”

The young protagonist, Mark Pacer, becomes a kind of hybrid. He’s left much of his upbringing behind to follow a totally different career and lifestyle, one hardly understood by relatives and friends from his childhood.

Yet he’s shadowed by that upbringing. His accent, of course, follows him, always setting him apart as soon as he speaks.

But more than that, he retains much from his childhood. He has shorn away many of the prejudices that warped some in his early community, but he finds many of his father’s teachings reflected in the oddest places where he travels in his career.

They shine back at him from a “foreign” friend who strengthens him to keep promises. Or they press him to help the vulnerable people he meets. Or they lead him to turn down career-enhancing moves because of less selfish motives.

Throughout his career, beginning in the 1970’s, Mark mirrors the disjointed society his country becomes. He struggles to toss out the garbage of an outmoded, even evil past while cherishing its treasures.

Some of the foundation built in his childhood is bedrock, other is sand. His life is an effort to discover which to stand on and which to let wash away.