5 minute read
Third Culture Kids
For a Third Culture Kid (TCK), the question “where are you from?” has no easy answer. In fact, it is the most frustrating and nerve-wracking icebreaker of all. For TCKs, travel is home.
The life of a TCK—someone who has been raised in a culture other than the one on their passport—is confusing. They have grown up outside of the country where their parents were born, and they have spent the majority of their developmental years abroad. A TCK belongs everywhere and nowhere.
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These individuals have grown up in a time of globalization when many people have international careers. They are the children of business people, military officials, government workers and expatriates, who live the international life. T
his overseas experience has created a third culture that fuses an individual’s native heritage with the foreign cultures they have been raised in. TCKs may have multiple senses of belonging, or have no real sense of belonging at all. For this very reason, home is a particularly complex and perplexing concept.
“I am constantly debating whether I should tell people I’m from Rhode Island or China,” said Samantha Menendez (ENG ’20). Originally from Rhode Island, Menendez grew up in Singapore and attended high school in Shanghai.
“With my blonde hair and American accent, I get weird looks and many questions if I say I’m from China,” she said. “Not to mention that I also speak the language, because I clearly don’t look Chinese. But, I also don’t want to tell people I’m from Rhode Island because if they’re American they’ll ask me obvious questions that I don’t know the answers to.”
The TCK’s diverse background is impossible to explain without an exhausting delineation of their life story. Many individuals tire of constantly repeating the same spiel.
“If it’s an Uber driver asking, I’ll lie and say I’m from California,” said Mikas Hansen (SAR ’20). “They believe it and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. If they ask me where specifically, I just say the Bay Area. It’s pretty fun.”
Hansen’s parents are from Lithuania and Denmark, but he has never lived in either country himself. An only child, he was raised in Russia, Kenya and China. “If you talked to me and my parents individually, you wouldn’t think we were related,” he said. “Honestly, I think my family deals with it really well. My friends at [Boston University] often forget that I’m international.”
Most of the time it is impossible to discern a TCK’s home because of their indistinct accent. This “international” accent most closely resembles an American one with certain twangs depending on where the TCK has lived. It is situational and can change according to the person they are talking to. Some TCKs are overly conscious of their accent and fight to keep it.
“My accent is crazy and confusing and slips in and out of American and English,” said Julia Townsend, a former BU student. Townsend was born in England and raised in Sweden, Australia and the United States. “I don’t want an American one because then I will just blend into this culture that I don’t really relate to. I’m also naturally reserved and socially anxious, so it actually breaks the ice when people hear my accent and know from the get-go that I’m different [from] them.”
Identity formation is not a conscious process. Many TCKs don’t recognize what is happening to them as they move from one continent to another. They don’t have a single identity tied to one place the way most adolescents do. They struggle with this process. At some point, they inevitably face an identity crisis, because after years of adapting, acculturating and assimilating, they can’t find a single sense of self in a multitude of past personas.
“I have started to become jealous of people who are able to understand how they fit into the place they live in. I have never had the opportunity or the time to do that myself,” said Townsend.
“I went through a long period of depression after moving to the U.S. for high school,” she said. “It had a lot to do with the culture shock of going from an all-girls Christian school in the U.K. to the ‘typical’ American high school. I was not surrounded by people who understood my experience or who understood me. I know I’d be happier now if I transferred to an English university, but I don’t think that I am English enough to feel supported on my own there.”
TCKs often feel like strangers in their own country. When they return to the country of their passport, they expect everything to finally be “normal.” For once, they expect to feel at home. Instead, they suffer from reverse culture shock. It is normal to feel foreign in a foreign country, but it is not normal to feel foreign in your own country. TCKs expect their home to be just the same, but it’s not, and they aren’t either. They belong to something that existed in the past.
“What’s complicated is that culture is constantly changing,” said Professor Nazli Kibria, Chair of BU’s Department of Sociology. “It is very hard to tell which parts are changing and which remain stable. A classic immigration example is when parents try to pass certain cultural traditions on to their children and these children eventually return to their home country to find that what their parents taught them is dated. It almost becomes an ancient culture, one that is no longer practiced in the present.”
Professor Kibria encourages TCKs to explore the multiple cultures they are from and to try and figure out the ways in which they actually do or do not belong. She believes that by acknowledging these similarities and differences, TCKs will be able to make better sense of themselves and where they stand.
The TCK’s sense of identity ultimately comes from being a TCK. It is not an easy one to determine when you develop a sense of relationship to multiple cultures while not having full ownership in any. TCKs have an innate, chameleon-like ability to adapt in different situations.
The disorienting experience of continously uprooting and relocating can be taxing. However, TCKs have it down to a science. It becomes practically routine, almost as simple as rinsing and repeating. Ask a TCK what they think of the lifestyle and they will likely tell you that they just don’t know any differently. They take their world with them wherever they go.
“When you move every three years, you spend the first year learning the area, the second year with your friends and the final year knowing that you’re leaving,” said Hansen.
TCKs are all too familiar with the pain of saying goodbye. It is not uncommon for a TCK to be asked how long they will be living in a place for when they start at a new international school. Many wonder “what’s the point?” when investing in new friendships. Understandably, leaving friends behind is often the most difficult part.
“I used to count down the days every summer until I could go back to Abu Dhabi and meet up with my old friends,” said Maaz Elahi (SAR ’20), who was born in Abu Dhabi and lived in Canada. “But, you eventually have to learn to let go and it’s tough. You have to realize that [your current country of residence] is your new home, and that there are better things to do during the summer than keep going back.”
The strongest TCK relationships transcend time zones. Today, many TCKs end up with friends placed sporadically across the globe. Their individual sense of belonging is in relationship to others of an equivalent background, and there is an instant connection when a TCK meets someone else who has lived between worlds. Although the list of countries may differ, the “where are you from?” uncertainty is identical.
Ironically, change is the only constant in the life of a TCK. The world is their home.
By Chloë Hudson | Photography by Carlos Subias Egas | Design by Deanna Klima-Rajchel
