We are not only Third Culture Kids…
A friend recently sent me a link to Adriano Massou’s Let’s Stop Calling Ourselves Third Culture Kids to which I had a very sudden urge to respond to. I found it profoundly interesting (read it several times) because it offers a refreshingly in-depth analysis on the subject of Third Culture Kids in comparison to all the irritating BuzzFeed bucket lists and GIFs that superficially try to summarize the actual chaos of the TCK experience.
As Massou points out, I was once also very enthusiastic to realize I could label myself a TCK, and I once enjoyed the TCK bucket lists as well, but now that I’m approaching 30, they don’t cut it for me anymore. There is no solace in seeing that there are ten thousand other kids liking a TCK bucket list when at the end of the day I still feel so confused and continue to struggle with the idea that I may feel rootless for the rest of my life. Reading these bucket lists has almost felt like a competition as well; “who’s the most TCK of us all?” What a strange notion and what does that even mean? If we were to compare being a TCK to a nationality, what would it mean, for example, to be the “most” French of all? Would it mean we are the definition incarnate of every stereotype of that nationality? Is this really desirable?
I remember a conversation I had about my strenuous desire over the past years living in Paris to become as French as possible. I felt guilty of not having read all the French classics, guilty of spelling and grammar mistakes in French, guilty of lacking knowledge on the history and geography of France and finally I felt excluded from many pop culture conversations between friends of mine. I felt that without this fundamental knowledge I could not possibly consider myself French and nor could others. Therefore knowing that I could consider myself a TCK came as a relief. It was a safe place I could go back to when I felt marginalized. Until I felt that I was also no longer a fully eligible TCK. Others had surpassed me in the TCK experience, having grown up not in three different cultures, but in seven, eight or nine. Speaking not two languages fluently but four, five or more!
On top of that, everything I once thought made me special and unique, to have traveled to distant places, to understand other cultures and to speak so many different languages, is now almost commonplace! How unfair it seems that the one thing I could still hang on to, admittedly brag about, and use as a force when I felt so many other disadvantages to being a TCK, has now been robbed from me by all these open minded and fearless adults that are throwing themselves into wild adventures left and right, casting shadows on my once glorious childhood. And what’s more is that I feel like they have so much more merit than me for doing it on their own, out of nowhere. They were never nursed into it and they still have the guts to try it all out and succeed.
Eventually I was told that I did not need all this knowledge to feel French. There were plenty of French people who had lived all of their lives in France, who could not spell, who had never read a classic, who had no pop culture references, and who certainly couldn’t tell you the names of all the French kings and queens. I proceeded to explain that I also felt I could no longer even consider myself a TCK…I had been in France for so long now, aside from my one year stint of traveling around the world, I was drifting away from something I had felt had identified my entire existence. But like Massou, I finally understood that I was not only a TCK. Identity is in fact not a fixed concept and the idea that I ever thought it was, is completely absurd.
Identity is made up of so many different aspects, and these aspects change throughout ones lifetime; it is quite clearly impossible to state that a person is the same from the day they are born to the day they die. I, for example, am a woman, a daughter, a sister, a writer, a photographer, a filmmaker, a friend, a colleague, a neighbor…all these things make up my identity and they are malleable. I used to be a student, and a girlfriend, and a ballet dancer, perhaps one day I’ll be a wife, a business partner, a mother, or a pilot. I can choose from any of these identities everyday and capitalize on one or all of them, sometimes none of them. I can add or subtract to them but most especially, because I am all these things, I don’t have to feel that being a TCK is the only thing that defines me. I don’t have to give it the power it has had and often times still has on my life, which is to make me feel rootless, confused and disengaged with day-to-day reality, all the while being incredibly aware of the rest of the world.
Giving a name to our condition, however, helps us feel connected. Massou cites Desmond Tutu: “You cannot be human on your own. You are human through relationships”, proceeding to suggest that we cast aside the TCK affiliation in order to become just human. Whilst I understand the principle behind Massou’s idea, to not get trapped in defining categories, I don’t believe that it is applicable. Nomenclature is part of a human brain’s fundamental mechanism and not affiliating with anything besides being a human is overtly utopian. I believe we can consider ourselves pertaining to many different “groups” without rejecting people pertaining to others. This is the direction we should aim for. I don’t think it is in our sincere interest to neutralize differences to seek a unique universal link between all humans such that we may one day achieve the nobel ambition of world peace. I believe TCKs are excellent ambassadors to the world in promoting the reality that we can embrace all religions, cultures, races, sexes but that doesn’t need to be done by a process of elimination. Just like there is variety in nature, variety in humanity is what actually enables our species to survive. Aristotle said “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” and if we can bring all humans to simply accept that anyone and everyone can think differently than them without being the enemy than we have already come one step closer to being truly human.
So not casting the label aside, I also don’t agree to embracing only this one identity. I know it’s important for the newer generations of TCKs to be able to identify with this term and have it help them understand a part of themselves the way it’s helped me, but like Massou, I feel it can easily become a crutch and I have used it to defend a lot of my shortcomings when I don’t actually believe all my shortcomings come from being a TCK, just like not all my qualities come from being a TCK. I think it’s important to not let one aspect of our identity dictate everything that we are. We should be able to create and recreate ourselves all the time.
I was recently reading Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People where he establishes a theory explaining that one cannot go through life being uniquely centered on work, a partner, family, money, friends etc. because if anything ever goes wrong in that one aspect of their life, then their whole “world comes crashing down”. The theory Covey suggests is to live a “principle” centered life, because principles don’t change, they don’t die, they don’t get angry, and they cannot leave you. Similarly to not putting all your eggs in the same basket, if you don’t depend solely on your TCK nature to define you, then, when you do succeed, you can also feel that it is not necessarily because you were a spoiled kid with incredible opportunities but also because you’ve since worked hard on yourself, and if you fail miserably, you do not have to reject your entire TCK nature because you’re over-thinking how messed up it has made you.
Like Massou, I agree that we shouldn’t hang on to the TCK identity, because once we have identified with this, we tend to feel that we must always identify with it. As we grow older and drift farther away from childhood we tend to feel that we are losing that identity and we panic. But this is not singular to TCKs. All people grow away from childhood and feel they are losing a piece of their identity. What makes us survive though is the ability to rebuild a new identity.
I won’t, however, cast aside my TCK identity altogether to embrace being just a “human being” as Massou suggests we do. Being a TCK and knowing some of my closest friends are also in this category will always represent a sort of safe space for me. I like to know that there are a few out there that have had the same miracles and traumas in their lives, that even through silence we feel we understand each other more profoundly than any other human being understands us. When we share our struggles and successes, they resonate so deeply within us. I feel that no one else could possibly come close to that type of intimacy with me. Obviously what factors highly into this, just as much as the TCK experience though, is that these close friends of mine are the same age as me, we grew up in Japan, we have a European background and we have known each other for almost twenty years.
Incorporating all of these other factors is perhaps what has enabled me to see beyond my TCK “affliction and benediction”. Although I have felt that upon meeting TCKs, there is at some level a very special connection between us, an understanding of certain aspects of life that we share and do not need to explain, I have also, however, let go of the fantasy that my understanding of these people will always be deeper and stronger than with someone who is not a TCK. In the eleven years I have lived in Paris I have made many strong friendships with people who are not TCKs, and I believe this is something I may never have noticed if I had moved around as much as I did in my childhood. Even if I consider myself a TCK, I don’t believe it’s the label that holds me back from connecting with other people.
Furthermore, where we were once told that an international education is training to be among the world’s elite, to have extraordinary advantages over the rest because of our ability to understand and accept so many cultures, languages, races, religions, ideologies… we are now often rendered irrelevant because there is no place for us to activate these great roles we were supposed to carry out. The stages for our most ambitious dreams have been removed and replaced with an alarmingly impoverished job industry with high unemployment rates, an increased population of over-educated adults fighting for the same meager career opportunities, economic tensions worldwide…we still pursue our parents principles: finish high school, go to university, graduate, go to university again, graduate again, pursue a career, find someone to marry, buy a house, have kids… It seems that almost all these notions of how to succeed one’s life are simply inapplicable in this day and age. We were trained in subjects that are so abstract and visionary, they are both among the highest forms of intelligence and at the same time completely impractical when it comes to applying for a job. These skills, not entirely unique to TCKs, but definitely intrinsic to them, are like herbs in a dish; they add incredible flavor, but on their own do not represent a satiating meal.
Our bosses rarely exploit these qualities because they are much too visionary for them to understand how to implement them in their workforce. It’s like having a library full of incredible novels and only being allowed to read one, over and over again. As I write this article, I await my next mission as a production manager of music videos, short films and web commercials, and the unemployment is perhaps staining my thoughts with a rather dull perception of the world’s current pulse, but I have not completely lost hope that our time will come where all the incredible skills we have acquired through the TCK experience will serve us rather than burden us. In the meantime, we cannot hang on to this identity without developing all our other ones. To begin, we might as well use one of our greatest TCK skills, adaption, and embrace all our other identities such that we do not let our TCK nature overpower everything else that we are and can become.
