Let’s stop calling ourselves Third Culture Kids
The term TCK helped us survive our college years. But now that we’re all grown up, it’s only holding us back.
I almost moved to CAR last week. I was interviewed for a position with the UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, a country so complex it’s only described using compound words like “war-torn,” “land-locked,” and “poverty-stricken.” Why would a 29-year old with a stable income and wonderful circle of friends want to trade a life of glamorous hipsterdom in Brooklyn for electricity blackouts and typhoid? I don’t know, and it’s freak-outs like these that make me reconsider the merits of being a third culture kid.
Should I move my kids to another country? Will uprooting them ruin their lives? I get asked these questions a lot by worried parents. The experience itself was incredible: new cultures, new languages, and new connections built with people from all over the world. But the most difficult part of growing up across cultures is not the experience; it’s the aftermath. After high school parties under the Eiffel Tower, there’s the reality check of college binge-drinking and boredom. Then it’s our mid-to-late twenties, when we find ourselves incapable of settling down and planting roots. I speak from my own experience, but dear TCKs, let me know if you feel me.
TCK — we all remember the joy of first learning the acronym. We were like those “Intro to Psych” students scrolling through the DSM, pointing out all the neuroses and personal quirks that we finally had a name for. “Prolonged adolescence,” “unresolved grief,” “difficulties sustaining long-term relationships,” tell me more! What a relief to finally be classified after years of feeling like mutants, outsiders to a world of stable childhoods and singular identities.
Initially, I reveled in my TCK identity. It helped me stave off existential crises to find solace in the amount of stamps in my passport, the unidentifiable quality of my accent, and the ability to visit friends in all four corners of the world (or at least Skype them). My life was like a quirky Buzzfeed article titled, “How you know you’re a TCK,” with the GIFs in 3D. I moved from country to country for work, school, or family reasons, collecting SIM cards and bank accounts.
But those months of constant change conversely brought great stagnation. I found myself reliving the same six months everywhere I went — settling into a new apartment, putting up the same posters, finding a favorite café to sit down and write. Rather than appreciate the differences of each city, I found they all melded into one unrecognizable Pangea.
So after moving countries 11 times in 4 and a half years, I decided to take the plunge and actually do something different. I took my first stable job, moved back to my country of birth, and built the sort of enjoyable life that can only come from knowing you will stay for more than a year. And yet, almost three years on, I’m itching to pack my bags once again, to cut all ties and start anew. I thought I’d forgotten this feeling.
My TCK identity is rearing its polymorphous head just as I had felt it withering away. After graduating from college, moving to a cosmopolitan city, and obtaining a stable income, I soon realized that a lifestyle of international intrigue is not unique to TCKs. At the age of 14, I was the only one in my immediate peer group who had ever taken a transatlantic flight; now everyone and their baby sister knows the difference between Buda and Pest. My finance friends are quitting their jobs, hiking the Amazon, and puking up ayahuasca to find the meaning of life. Even my Nebraska-bred neighbors are off to Berlin on a full expat package. Meanwhile, the language and symbols of our privileged, international youth have been long appropriated by INSEAD grads and Instagram celebrities. And I keep singing “Back, back, way back I used to front like Angkor Wat.”
Was that all we were in the end — global elites? So many of my friends have gone off to be “nomad capitalists” — financiers and entrepreneurs stashing money in offshore accounts, renouncing tax-heavy citizenships, and rotating between high-rises and beach-side bungalows. But if some TCKs are rushing to buy property in Monaco, just as many are moments away from moving to Mogadishu. Those TCKs that identify more strongly with the “global citizen” strand of our international upbringing feel just as pressured to prove their credentials.
Isn’t it ironic? Our entire Western philosophical project has been a struggle to emancipate the individual from collective forms of control and oppression. First came revolution, then reformation, but still our reactionary souls long to be classified and subjugated. We fought world wars to prove to ourselves all the things we could not change — our religion, our nationality. Here we are, TCKs, free to exist outside of a modern system of single origins. And what have we done? Defined ourselves by our inherent un-identifiability, creating yet another collective form of identity to which we ourselves feel the pressure to belong.
We thought we were beyond it. But we’re falling victim to the urge to singularize our diversity into one cohesive identity. Didn’t we learn our identities are in fact based on networks, dissonance, pluralism? As cultural chameleons, we have seen how identity — indeed, personhood — is a social construct that is meaningless without the other. “You cannot be human on your own. You are human through relationships.”We are free individuals, thrown into ever-changing communities. In my family I am the youngest; at work I am the expert; in love I am a partner. We all exist within networks, frameworks, and excerpts of a larger story.
Through globalization and technology, our networks have multiplied, all the while becoming more and more dispersed. The decoupling of identity and territory led to a fragmented sense of self, something we are seeing all over the world. If anything, the TCK is a prototype of the postmodern experience. Caught between different cultures,they are the connectors, the bridges. But TCKs should stand guard not to create a new nationality of third culture, exclusive and superior in nature. Like in the stories of X-Men, we mutants should not focus on how the TCK experience makes us special, but rather, how it makes us human. Side with Professor X, not Magneto. The most famous TCK of all — Barack Hussein Obama — did not turn away from a sense of locality. He became a community organizer, a constitutional law professor, and ultimately, the most powerful civil servant in the world.
I often think back to the words of Mandy Patinkin, who when asked about his spirituality, answered:
“Look… I’ll steal from anything that comforts me. Any religion, any lyric, any word written by any playwright, friend, therapist, child. I’ll take anything I can get to make this life understandable, to appreciate it, to not waste a gosh darn second of it.”
If there is one thing I have taken from growing up among different cultures, it is the understanding that every philosophy, religion, ideology, or work of art is a map of the human experience and that, at times, one map will be more useful to you than another. You learn to collect these maps and keep them in your back pocket should the moment arise, and to feel no conservative grief when switching between them.
The greatest obstacle to this is fear, because change shows us that even those things we take to be stable — our sense of identity, nationality, religion — are fluid concepts. Meaning can be taken away from us at any time, leaving us in the darkness. We quickly understand that most things in life are arbitrary and temporary.
Arbitrary and temporary, but not meaningless. Just because you can change identity from one day to the next, does not mean that identity no longer means anything. Instead, learn to grasp the concept of identity with the same nimble carelessness of fashion trends. Develop your own style. Wear it out. Change with the seasons. There will always be a loss of enchantment once you understand that things do not work by magic. This is growing up.
Last month I was in Turkey, a country whose national identity exists in this postmodern friction. Is it European? Middle Eastern? Secular? Muslim? Traditional? Modern? I had the fortune of visiting the Hagia Sophia (featured in the background picture). Built in 537 AD as an Orthodox church, it was reconsecrated as a mosque in 1453 when Ottomans took over the city. Most interestingly, in 1935, it was transformed as a museum under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of Turkey’s secular republic. Hagia Sophia means “Great Wisdom,” and has been a place of worship for millions for over 1,500 years.
That Hagia Sophia can change from a church to a mosque and now to a temple of human history does not negate any of its meaning. Even me, a jaded tourist, found the massive 255,800 m3 structure awe-inspiring. All of the love and emotion that has been poured into its hallways does not suddenly vanish with history. Truth, values, and ideas can be interchangeable, the expression of something ‘higher’ that cannot be articulated — that is the great wisdom.
By calling myself a TCK, I gained a sense of belonging. I felt like I was part of a community of like-minded souls. But when it came time to redefining my identity on new terms, beyond airplanes and satellite news channels, I found third culture to be just another yoke of collective identity I needed to throw off. I’m not a nomad capitalist, I’m not a global citizen, I am first and foremost a human being, free to define myself as I please. My parents will be thrilled to find out I’m not moving to CAR. I will not take decisions based on proving my identity, whether that is my Americanness or my TCK nature. And if anyone asks, Where are you from, I’ll tell them about the Hagia Sophia and how something can exist as multiple things — and still be utterly mesmerizing.
