One Asian Individual

About the Book

“One Asian Individual” follows Ruth Baja Williams’s first memoir, “Detour Berlin,” which chronicles her experiences in Cold War Berlin. After returning to the United States, Ruth becomes an American citizen. She misquotes the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. She thinks “one nation indivisible” is “one Asian individual.” Ruth decides that what she thought she heard was accurate after all because the second half of her life is about discovering herself, her Asian self.

About the Author

Although she was born in Manila, Ruth Baja Williams never lived in the Philippines. Leaving the land of her birth at age two, she was in California at the start of the Second World War. At the war’s end, her father entered the Philippine Foreign Service. Now as the daughter of a Philippine diplomat, Ruth lived in Hong Kong, Djakarta, and Sydney. Undergraduate studies brought her to California, but Cupid lured her to Germany, where she spent twenty years. On returning to the United States, she realized she belonged everywhere and nowhere.