culture
By now I’m able to perfectly recite my answer to the inevitable question of ‘Where are you from?’. I’m English, born in Watford, and raised anywhere but. By the time I started university I had lived in my home country, Germany, Cyprus, Colombia and South Africa. My experience in each place was incredibly different and equally definitive for who I am today. I’ve got a British passport, I support England in sports and I grew up with distinctly ‘English’ mannerisms. But these have inevitably been diluted and adapted to the varied cultures I have lived in. Even though I claim this home identity, when I arrived back in the UK in 2018, I quickly felt like a pretender as flatmates, new friends and even extended family members made my own experience of my ‘original’ culture seem like a tourist’s rose-tinted view. There are some clear benefits to growing up abroad. I learnt two new languages, experienced daily life in vastly different cultures and got to travel to places I never could have if I had just stayed in one place. 15 years of living outside my home country gave me a multi-faceted view of the world and allowed me to forge strong connections with friends from so many different backgrounds, some of them similarly considered ‘third culture kids’ whose friendship groups span multiple countries. Living abroad means foreign culture will shape part of your identity and when you embrace it in each country you live in it’s hard to consider any one place ‘home’. As a third culture kid, I don’t really subscribe to one specific culture or set of traditions. I have adopted different customs from the countries I have lived in and each experience contributes to a kind of global identity. This is probably the main benefit of being considered a third culture kid, as each new place I go allows me to start with a clean slate, ready to absorb fresh ideas and mix them with what I already have. With globalisation, this form of adaptation to new cultures is something that I believe we’ll all develop naturally, as it has become so much easier to encounter different cultures. Nonetheless, living abroad definitely accelerated this mindset and by the time I arrived in South Africa I was finding it easy to take in the new landscape and add it to what I had learned from everywhere else I lived.
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Naturally, there are negatives. When I finally settled back in the UK in 2018, I realised when speaking with new friends that I knew about as much of my home culture as I did of Colombia’s, or Cyprus’. Abroad, I was always ‘the English boy’. In an international school setting where nationalities were the most distinguishing trait in a person,
Third Cult that meant something. At ‘home’ in the UK, I received the same quizzing on my hometown, accent and travels. Questions I had become used to but hadn’t expected in my home country. In a group of British people, I still often feel foreign because it can be difficult to relate to their childhood experiences. I’m not as in-tune with British culture and the daily goings-on as I’d like to be. I found myself relating more to foreign students, as I realised that I can understand their stories of coming to the UK and delving into a new culture. On the whole, I can’t say that being considered a third culture kid is a bad thing. I enjoy having knowledge and experience with so many different cultures. Living abroad has given me friends across the world and I’m able to feel at home in a multitude of foreign environments. I’m thankful I had such experiences early in my life. I’ll never not have a convoluted answer to ‘where are you from?’, but it’s a conversation starter and I’m getting used to being an ‘outsider’. words by: Marcus Yeatman-Crouch artwork by: Shubhangi Dua
