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| Me with nine year old me. Poor quality Itouch picture of my role as a laughing clown in the musical Clowns when I was in New Delhi, India. My joke: "Why do giraffes have such long necks? To reach the HIGH notes!" |
Whenever I tell people that I am a third culture kid, I usually get one of two reactions.
Reaction 1: For those who know what a TCK is, they ask where I have lived and the conversation goes on.
Reaction 2: For those who have never met or heard of the term TCK, they stare at me blankly.
Once I explain I again usually get one of two reactions.
Reaction 2a: Some people are like, "Whoa! That is so cool! I can't believe you got to live in all those places, how was it?"
Others have a rather different reaction...
Reaction 2b: "So what?"
And that is a valid question, so what? Why should it matter that I have grown up in 7 different international cities or that I spent my breaks going around India or Southeast Asia. What differentiates me from an adult who grew up in one place and then traveled after high school or, usually, after college?
The answer is a lot. And not just we are two different human beings who are our own individuals. Our outlook on life and what we base our experiences on is a world apart, literally.
I am writing this post because honestly, it is extremely disheartening when I get the "so what" reaction. There are some TCKs who really don't care how other people think about their upbringing or in an effort to just blend in, won't really address it. Others don't really hold onto it as a lifelong identity and think history is history, what matters is the now. My brother is one who feels like bringing the whole TCK thing up is just rubbing it in people's faces and that it does more harm than good. He also thinks some TCKs are too up in their own @$$es to do anything other than live in the glory days.
While I will definitely be writing a post on how we TCKs or ATCKs (adult TCKs, which is what I am now I guess) need to get off our high horses (especially me), honestly there is a difference in people who have had one solid home in one culture versus those who have had to constantly shift our interpretations of what home means.
There were two conversations I had recently that have made me want to write this post. The first was in Hong Kong and the second was in Washington DC. In Hong Kong, I was out to dinner with a friend of mine and his friends. When the inevitable question of background came up, I got reaction 2a from most of the table but there was one guy who flashed me the 2b. He then turned around and started talking about the opportunities he got as a Princeton in Asia fellow and how much travel he has managed to do in spite of his grueling work as a financial something or other.
The one in DC went much the same except that this girl was much more modest and instead stated that she, "controls the world" because she worked as a liason in the State Department. Facetious or not, there was a little part of her that believed it. Welcome to DC.
It really irked me how my entire life experience was dismissed and diminished because of how on top of the world they felt. I am the first to admit that I can condescend to people who were raised in one place and it is a reaction that I have worked very hard to curb. I am aware of it and I work to better myself. There was a big part of me growing up that wished I could be like the girls in the movie Now and Then who had their own tree house from when they were children.
I respect those who stepped out of their comfort zone and went out into the wider world, I really do. The least I ask is their respect in return for having experienced those shocks to the system much earlier in life.
I'll try to break it down into a list, even though I am simplifying:
1. You have something to compare your new experiences to.
Even if you have traveled to a ton of countries and compare one to another, you will deep down always measure home by where you grew up. Even if you hated your upbringing.
We have only other countries. There is no norm for us. There was no baseline of "if I was at home, things would be like this..." We have "if I were in Manila or Chennai it would be like this, but it's not at all close to Taiwan or Beijing."
2. The shock to the system is normal for us.
Every new place we moved brought something new, so much so that new became normal. A lot of people who have gone overseas the first time go wild. So much newness is can be overwhelming. One example is with China. A lot of people who have gone to China for the first time fall in love with it and then proceed to oscillate between love (WOOOO NO OPEN BOTTLE LAWS) and hate (SO SICK OF HOW POLLUTED IT IS!).
TCKs tend to be a bit more middle ground when it comes to a new city. We have had to learn how to pick apart the pros and the cons because every place has its pros and its cons.
3. Habits
This actually came to me when I read a friend's post on Facebook. She has been living in China for quite awhile and just returned to the US. She wrote a status along the lines of how she almost stopped her mom from filling up water from the tap. That is a huge no no in China and India and most places in Asia. All of the comments were about habits that people had just picked up during their time abroad. These were habits picked up from stints in only one place and were newly learned (as in they weren't brought up that way).
TCKs have an amalgamation of habits depending on where we have lived, international friends we have had, etc. Instead of contending with the rules of one culture, we have had to juggle many and that shows in how we approach situations.
It's even little things like having learned how to navigate between different languages and peoples from when we were toddlers. It almost feels like having multiple personalities. I can pretty much guarantee that every TCK has gotten into a fight with friends over being "fake" because all of a sudden we act markedly changed with different groups of friends. I have even been the accuser in spite of having had that same accusation lobbed at me.
4. Emotional baggage
Every group and culture has their own brand of emotional baggage. Ours is almost entirely made up of identity crises. I wrote a post on the topic of Recovering TCKs which is a group that feel like they have been emotionally scarred or hurt because of our upbringing. If you read the post, you'll know that I berate that mentality and am a supporter of having a great deal of pride in how we were raised.
We are a contradiction. While we can come off with all the arrogance that traveling the world will bring out in a person, we are also all struggling to figure out who we are. The angst ranges from person to person but we have all been through that phase.
This is a very unique form of identity crisis because nothing is taken for granted. We don't have a fall back of "I am from this place and I have always lived in this place and this culture."
It's a combination of questioning your nationality, your ethnicity (for me at least), your culture, and how you fit with the world. It also deals with how well we can match people's expectations of us with how we perceive ourselves. A big element is compromise. How much are you willing to let go for the sake of facilitating an interaction. Another part is who you belong to. Having a community is so important and up until the boom of the internet, it wasn't easy to keep in touch with other people like you.
I was on the cusp when I moved to the US during 5th-8th grade. Email was around but it was still mail for me. I remember how completely alone I felt in my experiences. I couldn't relate to anyone because they had all grown up together. I was the outsider who moved there from India but wasn't Indian...
Honestly it's exhausting having this weigh on you. I completely understand why people don't ascribe to this label and disappear into the personality that best adapts to those around you, even if it isn't all of you.
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This is a long post and those are some of the main points so I'll stop here for now!
as for 3. Habits: I find it extremely hard to descend from a mile up my own ass (superiority-complex base camp) and point out that you don't pick up a habit on a 21-day whirlwind tour of Asia or otherwise. It has taken me a while to give credit to the relatively brief experiences of others overseas, however 'life-changing' they laud them to be. People are genuinely impacted by their travel experiences - even if they are shepherded between backpacker inns and bars and main drag attractions by a tour guide (even as I write this I struggle) because it is a huge shock to the system compared to everything they have known previously.
ReplyDeleteIt's a two way street though, too. A lot of people who had a normal upbringing closely guard their travel experiences because it differentiates them from everyone else - and then TCKs come a long and disregard it all as a drop in the ocean (aforementioned base camp).
Love these posts Cici!
Excellent post. I find the comment from the gentleman in Hong Kong to be particularly interesting. Hong Kong, given its history of being such an expatriate (and by extension, TCK-building) base-land, I would assume that he'd said something similar to someone else in his time there who had similarly wanted to slap some sense into him. Even now as I think back to the two two-year stints I had in Hong Kong during my TCK years, I am having memories flash into my mind that fall perfectly into your "habits" section. Etiquette, food, the way the table is laid, the noise and smells that surround you, how you're supposed to approach orders, purchasing, manners, dinner-table-culture. It's all things that an Expat and non-TCK wouldn't impulsively draw back to. But when you put a pair of chopsticks in my hands, I become a completely different man at a table to when I have a seven-course-meal set of silverware.
ReplyDeleteThis, however, I put to you: I agree with many of your sentiments, in fact, I agree with all of them. However, emotional baggage section raises an interesting memory of overcoming the challenge of my own internal crisis in being a TCK feeling trapped in my adulthood. I, like you, support the pride in our upbringing. That's why I keep a blog about Third Culture Kid Life. However, I think that it's awfully personality specific in the way we handle that moment. Take, for example, myself. I'm a massive introvert. My TCK upbringing taught me how to pretend to be an extrovert to the point that when I tell people I'm an introvert, they simply refuse to believe me. However, this does not change the fact that truly that's what I am. It took me 15 years of constantly moving, restarting, rebuilding my life to learn how to be what I'm not. Since writing Third Culture Kid Life, I have encountered many people who, like myself, are introverts. The sad part is, where I managed to overcome the fear of my upbringing, many did not. When those people hit that moment in adulthood where they are forced to confront their youth, they handle it in a drastically different way to you or I. They run and hide from it, not because they are ashamed, but because the idea of confronting it with every single person they meet, of having to be constantly on the defensive about who they are, is absolutely terrifying to them. It's crippling.
So while I support (and love by the way) this article, I think that the individual personality of TCKs comes a lot into play with how they cope with that transition. So I try not to chastise, and instead attempt to nurture the introverts that didn't handle things the way I did. Because like you, I believe we were given a gift that so many will never experience. And because of it, the world and travel mean so much more to us than it could ever mean to any FCK.
James,
ReplyDeleteThank you for such a wonderful response! Funny enough, my university entrance essay was on the different eating habits that I had inculcated based on the places I lived. It ranged from just my hands to chopsticks and finally silverware, my weakest skill.
I also wanted to thank you for explaining the recovering TCK mentality in such a clear and unique manner. I had not really considered how coping mechanisms differed between extroverts and introverts. I feel like I walk the line between an introvert and an extrovert and depending on my circumstance, can go either way. The reason why I never really became a true introvert is because of my international upbringing. There was a period of time when I lived in the U.S. where my introverted nature came to the fore and I wanted nothing more than to sequester myself away with books. Then I moved to Chennai and that ceased to be an option because of how small my school was. It was during my time there that the extrovert that I had been before the U.S. reemerged and so I have always been grateful for returning overseas.
I suppose my tough love approach isn't working so well and I would be happy to hear more about your experiences both as a TCK and now helping other TCKs work through the issues that we all have.
Thanks Niamh! Funny enough, traveling with the Boy has been the best
ReplyDeletelesson in being patient with how shocking the world can be to a person
who hasn't grown up traveling. Things that I don't blink twice at stress
him out immensely and I have had to learn to respect his feelings
instead of dismissing them.