Thank you very much for the links! There is some truly fascinating stuff here. Will have to ponder some more (though I don’t really think I have a mother country in the sense that is usually meant, when the chips come down).

When Heidegger quoted “Return to the homeland” poem shortly after Hölderlin return from Switzerland, it was to point out that real world is pre-builded by language :
“before morning shines up,
before noon burns life up,
I called it in silence …”

I think that we get a problem when nostalgy born by linking language to any identity (even if it is authentic) and not to future worlds (whatever language spoken).

Perhaps any clues:
-A bosnian fiction writer living in the USA, Aleksandar Hemon’s interview “Exile on Any Street” [http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/1532/not_melted_into_the_pot/] about his way to face up with 2 cultures.
-”Imaginary homelands of writers in exile’s book” points out that double identity writers treat exile not only as a political condition, but also as a new way to understanding the self because each one creates an ideal imaginary land.
-Stranger at home’s article [http://www.logosjournal.com/?q=node/66] , of Andrey Gristman, try to answer “who gives the right to a foreign poet write in a non-native language?”.

Exile? yes. Not from mother country (as militant of lost causes) but from reality … to re-built it.

“Sadly, in the end, I suspect that the only culture you can ever be authentic to is your own, taken to mean your narrow set of experiences and memories. The moment you set foot outside the boundaries of your own brain, you have to bridge a gap–and the gap gets worse the more you step away from what you know.”

{nods}

But even as halfies, I think we are not necessarily able to speak authoritatively on both (or either) of our halves. For example, my own mother constantly tells me that I’m not really Chinese and don’t really know what Chinese culture is like. Okay, but my American friends tell me I’m not really American and don’t really know what 100% American culture is like either. So where does that leave me?

I’m oversimplifying the problem here — and maybe I’m hypersensitive about my identity — but as a writer I find it both enriching and frustrating to have so many cultural perspectives (but none that are 100% “accurate”) to draw from.

Sadly, in the end, I suspect that the only culture you can ever be authentic to is your own, taken to mean your narrow set of experiences and memories. The moment you set foot outside the boundaries of your own brain, you have to bridge a gap–and the gap gets worse the more you step away from what you know. The moment you start imagining how a character with a given mindset would react to a given situation, you’re starting to filter through your own cognition, and it’s no longer quite accurate.
To take my Aztec tales as examples (as you rightly point out, they would give archaeologists fits): they are indeed filtered through my own perceptions, through the needs of the narration and through what I characters with a certain mindset would be feeling in situations llike those. I have absolutely no pretence that I’m writing accurate fiction in the sense that Aztec characters back in the 15th century would have thought like this. I have done my research and created the world to the best of my ability, but, as you say, there’s a gap between me and an Aztec that won’t ever be bridged. (the term “accurate fiction’, more than anything, probably summarises the impossiblity at the heart of what we’re crafting, whether it be in SF or in other genres: we are crafting lies that must be plausible, and twisting life into narrations that make sense. Authenticity tends to fly out the window at this point anyway).