15 minute read
Spotlight Interview: Danau Tanu, PhD
Danau Tanu
Spotlight Interview
Advertisement
Our December Spotlight interview with Danau Tanu, PhD, coincides with the publication this month of her book, Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School. Danau, like many TCKs, didn’t know until young adulthood that there was a “label” for people like her. In this thought-provoking and timely interview, she explains how she first rejected, then accepted, then finally outgrew (to some degree) the term third culture kid as an identifying label for herself. Danau unpacks the ways in which Western culture is most often normative in international schools and how that tends to marginalize non-Western students’ experiences, even though they, too, are TCKs. Her insights here, as well as those in her book, are particularly helpful today as we have more honest conversations about how race, language, and culture play out in norms and power structures within international schools and communities.
- David C. Pollock
"Tell us a bit about your experience as a TCK."
I was born in Canada to an Indonesian father (of Chinese descent) and a Japanese mother. My sister and I grew up speaking four languages. We moved to Indonesia when I was around three, where I attended an international school for most of my life. But I also went to an Indonesian kindergarten for a year and a Japanese primary public school for 5th/6th grade (that was a difficult year), and an international school in Singapore for my last year of high school. The TCK literature often talks about repatriation, but I wouldn’t know which country would count as repatriation for me since my passport (Canadian), ethnicity (Chinese and Japanese), and parents’ passports (Indonesian and Japanese) don’t match up. I’ve also never moved due to my parents’ work because they were more like serial migrants who, to this day, can’t seem to stop moving. While I did some moving when I was younger, the longest string of moves was starting from age 16 when I moved around 12 times in 11 years between six countries for varying reasons. I was emotionally exhausted by the end of it. I’ve since tried to stay put in one place with mediocre success. It took me a while to realize that I hate moving!
One of the experiences that had the biggest impact on my life as a TCK has been attending an English-medium international school while being from a non-English-speaking family. I was living in my father’s country (Indonesia), but I felt like an immigrant kid living in a Western country when I was at school. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why everyone else’s mom knew how to bake brownies while mine didn’t, or where my classmates bought their Cabbage Patch dolls and those Nerds candies. We only had one department store in Indonesia in the early eighties and I had never seen any of that stuff there. Back then it wasn’t like you could Google it online to find out, right? So, I’d often feel out of place because I didn’t understand the cultural references at school even though I was with other TCKs.
At age six or seven you instinctively know how to “code-switch,” or switch languages depending on who you are talking to. You know that you have to speak English at school and that you have to speak Japanese to your mom and Indonesian to your neighborhood friends. But you don’t fully understand why. You don’t understand why the American teachers and American classmates at school seem to “get” each other while you don’t, even though you speak English like they do. As a kid you don’t understand that there’s this thing called “culture” and “cultural difference” even among people who speak the same language. So, you end up thinking there’s something wrong with you.
Also, I learnt what a penny was before learning about the rupiah because Indonesia, the country in which all of us at school were living, didn’t exist in our textbooks. And back then nobody in the storybooks that we read had black hair like me. It’s as though people like me didn’t exist or were just not important enough to mention. And you grow up with this peculiar feeling that the non- English-speaking part of you is somehow inferior.
So when I started reading about TCKs, I already knew that it wasn’t just international moves that affect a child’s identity. I knew that education and the school environment have a profound role in shaping a child’s identity and how they feel about it. This is why I ended up researching international schools.
"Talk about when you discovered that you were a TCK—when did you apply that label to yourself?"
The first time I heard the term “third culture kid” was around 2007. I was already in my early 30s and I was catching up with an old friend from one of the international schools I had attended. She casually said to me, “Do you know that we’re called third culture kids?” I was like, “Huh?” I think she explained that the term describes “people like us” who feel in between cultures or something like that. At the time, the thought of having a label struck me as weird. And I don’t think I was convinced that anyone could possibly understand what it felt like to have such a complicated background like mine. So I left it at that and didn’t think much about it for about a year, until I decided to apply for graduate school.
I knew I wanted to do my doctoral dissertation on identity and education, and that’s when I remembered about that curious term my friend had mentioned. I started researching it and found out about David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken’s book, Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds (now in its third edition, which Michael Pollock contributed to and revised), and went to my university bookstore to look for it. The thing is, I was living in Australia—in Perth, which is one of the most isolated developed cities in the world, and not a very big one at that. I was 100 percent sure that my tiny university bookstore (this was before online bookstores took over physical stores) would not have a book about international mobility and the mixed identities of some obscure group with a funny name. But I walked down to the store to check anyway, you know, just to be sure. And guess what? I found one brand new copy of the book on their shelf. I was so stunned that I still remember which part of the store and which shelf it was on. I might not have paid attention to the “third culture kid” concept when drafting my research proposal had it not been so easy to find the book.
So, I read the book. The current, third edition is much more diverse, but the one I read was the first edition. There was a lot in the book I could relate to, such as restlessness, rootlessness, and so on. But I couldn’t shake off the feeling that it was written more about the white expat kids I had gone to school with than about me. I did an internet search of the term and only a handful of websites that mentioned it came up back then. One of them was TCKid.com, founded by Brice Royer. I was still not personally sold on the concept, but I signed up for their mailing list and blog access anyway, thinking it was “for the sake of research.”
Immediately I received an automated response with a PDF attachment. It was a short article Ruth Van Reken had written on “TCK Relationships and Grief.” I read it, and that’s when it hit me. I cried as all the unresolved grief washed away. I cried so much that my neighbor came to check on me to see if I was okay! Ruth’s work was a godsend. It’s hard to explain but I think it spoke to the sense of alienation I had been carrying around for a long time. But it’s gone now, and that’s when I began to use the term.
I don’t go around saying “I’m a TCK” anymore. I think as you get older you learn to connect with others in many other ways and not just as a TCK. But I still use the term as a shorthand for the third culture experience when talking to others, because I think it’s helpful for those who haven’t yet processed their mobile or culturally-mixed upbringing.
"What do you think about the term TCK? Is it sufficient to describe and include all those who grew up in a different culture or country than that of their parent(s)?"
That’s a good question, but difficult to answer in a few paragraphs. Many people who the book refers to as “CCKs” or “cross-cultural kids” are already using the TCK label to describe themselves because they can relate to the “third culture” experience of cultural mixing. In that sense, I think the third edition of the book has really helped to incorporate a more diverse perspective of the third culture experience. Others feel as though the focus on international mobility makes the term seem like an exclusive club and, therefore, they avoid it. Then there are those who argue that the term should focus exclusively on international mobility. And these debates can sometimes get emotionally charged when someone feels as though any reinterpretation of the term infringes on their sense of identity.
As researchers, however, we need to be able to separate our personal identification with the term—or the way it is used as an identity label—from its conceptual usefulness. As I see it, there are two separate factors that shape the traditional TCK (expat kid, missionary kid, etc.): being culturally mixed (third cultured) and the experience of (international) mobility. But there are many who feel culturally mixed without having moved while growing up, such as children of minorities, mixed marriages, immigrants, and deaf adults, to name a few. So, to say that only children who experience international mobility are third cultured does not make sense. In fact, John Useem and Ruth Hill Useem originally used the term “third culture” in a much more flexible way in the 1960s, which I talk about elsewhere. By their definition, the third culture wasn’t just about international mobility.
"Can you share about the key themes and discoveries of your research into TCKs? What does today’s TCK community need to know?"
I wanted to bring a more diverse perspective to the TCK conversation. Discussions about TCKs often sound as though we live in a utopian world where social, economic, and racial hierarchies don’t exist. And so we don’t talk about it or we act as though it doesn’t affect TCKs. In reality, the experience of a TCK from a developing country who has to spend two weeks applying for visas every time they want to travel as a tourist (and needs a pile of bank statements and sponsorship letters to prove they are not going to become an illegal immigrant to get the visa) is very different from someone traveling on an American passport. Once a Ghanaian TCK repatriates, they may never be able to earn enough on a Ghanaian salary to ever leave the country again.
The majority of research on TCKs tends to gloss over issues of language, race, and so on and presents the international schools many TCKs attend as neutral international spaces. But they’re not. The experience of an African or African American TCK at an international school where she’s the only black person among 300 students and staff is different from a white kid who has plenty of adult white role models at school among the teachers, other staff, and all the historical figures in their textbooks and main characters in the novels.
Or for international school students who are not from English-speaking backgrounds, especially those whose families have not lived in the West, it is like being a child of an immigrant in a Western country. They have to integrate into the dominant school culture without having their home culture (and identity) affirmed apart from pictures of flags hanging on the classroom walls. And at home you might have to translate the letter your school sent to your parents because they don’t understand English; or you might behave differently at home than you do at school. It’s like you are Western by day and Asian by night.
"You’ve talked with many TCKs. Can you share a story you’ve heard that really stuck with you, that perhaps gave you a new or deeper insight into TCKs?"
There was a white American TCK—let’s call him “Tom”—who was a “stayer” at his international school in Indonesia. Tom had been at the same school since kindergarten. I met him when he was in his junior year (11th grade). Tom’s friend introduced him to me as the guy who had recently started taking private lessons to improve his Indonesian. I was a bit puzzled about why Tom wanted to learn the language so late in the game. Tom explained that he realized he would soon be repatriating to the US for college and had very little to show for the years he had spent in Indonesia, which made up most of his life.
Living in another country for many years and not learning the local language is quite common for both TCKs and expats. Local language classes are often treated as unimportant by international schools so students don’t take it seriously. There is this unspoken perception that having a taste of local culture, which usually means food and dances, makes you “international,” but becoming too familiar with the local culture (such as becoming fluent in the local language) makes you too local and not international enough. (In her upcoming book, The Global Imaginary of International Schools, Dr. Heather Meyer writes that it happens at international schools in Germany, too.) This was not surprising to me, but what struck me was that Tom thought this was problematic and tried to change it. If we want to help TCKs learn how to belong, we need to help them do what Tom did—make meaningful connections with the places in which they live.
This type of TCK experience has rarely been talked about because we’ve been too busy congratulating ourselves on how international and open-minded we are. In our celebrations of internationalism, the focus is usually on mobility and crossing borders—airports, jet lag, number of countries lived in, school field trips overseas, etc. It may vary across generations and on the types of schools you attend or why your family moved. But generally, I find we spend very little time talking about building meaningful local connections. At international schools we focus on the new students and new teachers who just moved from another country, as though the “stayers” are somehow less international or not TCK enough. But how can we expect TCKs to build connections anywhere if they are not encouraged and taught to build connections in the country where they live?
"Your background as a TCK seems to have strongly influenced your career path. Can you share your hopes for how your current work will help other TCKs? Also, what do you imagine your future work will look like?"
Reading Ruth Van Reken and David Pollock’s work, as well as other works about identity, such as postcolonial studies, really helped me sort out my own identity confusion. There is something healing about seeing your own story told back to you as you read, after having spent so many years thinking that you are imagining it all. So when I wrote my book, I pictured two audiences in my mind. The first were TCKs from non-white, non-English-speaking backgrounds like myself.
I thought that if they could see themselves in the book, it would help them spend less time struggling with identity issues and get on with their lives. I had one reader write to me saying she found it in her university library and read it in two nights—like, who does that with an academic book unless they can relate to it? Second, I wanted to write for the white, Anglophone educators who shape policies and curriculum in international schools. I know many of them are committed to internationalism and diversity but may be unaware of their blind spots. I felt that if I could reach them, they could help change their schools so children don’t have to feel like minorities at school or struggle with identity.
As for the future, I’ve tried to move on to other topics since I finished my PhD. But for some reason, I can’t seem to get away from the TCK topic. I want to do more research and write more. I want to use the insights we’ve gained about TCKs to contribute to the bigger-picture discussions about identity and multiculturalism beyond TCK circles, and vice versa. I think we can learn a lot from studies done on other populations, too.
Danau Tanu, PhD, is a Visiting Research Fellow at Waseda University, Japan, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. She also authored Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School, the first book on structural racism in international schools, which will be released as a paperback in December 2020. Danau is co-chair of the Families in Global Transition (FIGT) Research Network and co-founder of TCKs of Asia and Third Culture Stories podcast.
To receive a 25% discount on Growing Up in Transit in paperback, purchase directly from the publisher and use the coupon code TAN958.
www.danautanu.com Twitter: @danautanu IG: @growingupintransit
