Such an ordinary question, but one that has haunted Ariel Dorfman all his life. For a generation of Latin American readers, Dorfman will always be the brash young Chilean who fought the good fight against US cultural colonialism and the Disney Empire. (Along with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart, Dorfman is the co-author of ``How to Read Donald Duck,'' one of the many books selected for televised public burning during the early days of the Pinochet government.) He will always be the tireless Chilean exile, prolific writer of op-ed pieces, champion of countless Latin American solidarity groups, author of ``Death and the Maiden'' and other works that have taught us more than all the newspaper accounts, perhaps even more than the Truth Commissions, about the horrors of this hemisphere's Dirty Wars. But as Dorfman writes in his powerful memoir, ``Heading South, Looking North,'' the answer to that original haunting question -- where are you from? -- is not so simple.

The grandson of Eastern European Jews who arrived in Argentina at a time when Buenos Aires rivaled New York as a beacon for immigrants, Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman was born in the Argentine capital in 1942. Vladimiro because his father admired Lenin; Ariel because his mother admired an influential turn-of-the-century essay, titled with that Shakespearean reference, about Latin American cultural pride. (With the onset of the Cold War, his parents began suggesting he tell his friends he was named after the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Dorfman resolved the problem by calling himself Edward or Eddie.)

The rise of Peronism in Argentina prompted the family's exile to New York in 1945; less than a decade later, the rise of McCarthyism in the United States prompted his father to accept a United Nations post in Santiago. By then, Eddie Dorfman was a fluent English-speaker who refused to speak Spanish, and the reluctant young immigrant found solace in a British-run school where boys caught speaking the forbidden language in the playground were ordered to copy a thousand times ``I am not to speak Spanish during break.'' But gradually he would to fall desperately in love with Chile -- and with a Chilena.

When General Augusto Pinochet bombed the National Palace on September 11, 1973, Dorfman was working as the cultural and media adviser to President Salvador Allende's chief of staff. Because of a series of coincidences, he was not at the palace the day of the coup. ``I should not be here to tell this story,'' his memoir begins. ``It's that simple: there is a day in my past, a day many years ago in Santiago de Chile, when I should have died and did not.''

At a time when memoir writing has become commonplace and no detail of personal or family life deemed too private, ``Heading South, Looking North'' is that rarest of gifts -- a book of tremendous courage that is also an elegant meditation on language and literature. As Dorfman writes, this is a story of many exiles, three countries, two languages, and a man ``who has come to believe that to tolerate differences and indeed embody them personally and collectively might be our only salvation as a species.''

This is the story of an Argentine kid who loved Disney and a passionate cultural warrior for Allende's Chile, of a privileged intellectual who becomes a spokesman for Latin America's poor because he speaks fluent English and lived many years ``in the rich North.'' It is also the story of a man who comes to terms with his own and the movement's mistakes, while never wavering from the idea that social justice is the biggest overdue debt in Latin America.

Dorfman imagines a dialogue with his younger, strident, arrogant self: ``I will tell him that the desire for purity may lead to fanaticism and ethnic strife and fundamentalism,'' he writes. ``I will tell him that the poor do not need to be represented by a paternal voice, no matter how benevolent. I will tell him that if you reduce everything to politics and ideology, you wind up totalizing, squeezing the mystery out of life and explaining away too easily what at times has no explanations. . . . I will tell him this and much more . . . everything that I think he did wrong. But there is one thing I will not tell him, that young man I used to be. I will not tell him, I have never told that alter ego of mine in the past, that he was wrong to rebel.''

Today Dorfman divides his time between Chile and North Carolina, where he is a professor at Duke University, a place where ``Cultural Studies'' reigns supreme and where anyone who is anyone in the English department has written a literary memoir about life, language, and, when all else fails, the great American angst of graduate school. Occasionally he falls into the trap, speculating on his infant self and resorting to embarrassingly mangled phrases such as ``I am left to ponder and milk that foundational moment of my life for meaning.'' This is doubly annoying, since most of the writing is eloquent -- whether painfully direct, or lyrical and poetic.

Above all, Dorfman has written the most universal of stories, a meditation on the fragility and uncertainty of life. Like all survivors, he is haunted by still another fundamental question: Why me? Why am I here to tell the tale? Several years after the coup, he meets up with the man who gave him the short-lived job with the Allende administration. Somebody had to live to tell the story, he tells Dorfman.

But Dorfman is not so sure: ``It does not explain why so many of my brothers and sisters, just as talented, as much in love with life, had to die. . . . It does not entirely beat back the fear that life is blind and hazardous and that we stumble in the tender darkness and try to fool ourselves into believing that there is a pattern to all this.'' There may not be a pattern to all this but, as Dorfman insists, there is still hope and a common purpose. Many years ago he set a goal for himself, ``to become totally, definitively, forever Chilean by writing myself into the country and the country into myself.''

He has done that, and far more. In ``Heading North, Looking South,'' Dorfman reminds us that it is still possible to be from America, in the largest, most generous, and most profound sense of the word.