My Global Girl
Out of the mouths of babes, the world can be wonderfully simple — or alarmingly simplistic.
If you could come to our house, my eldest daughter Isabel would change your life forever with her wit, humor and sparkling insight. OK, maybe that’s a stretch. She would at least put a smile on your face, and she would smile back, revealing her signature single dimple.
Isabel is a Danish-American, Holland-born expat child, raised in India and Thailand. She has visited more countries, tasted more cuisines, and heard more languages than many people believe would be possible in an entire lifetime. She’s eight.
Aside from an endearing genetic defect (that dimple), part of Isabel’s charm is that she doesn’t feel like she belongs to any particular country. Ask her where she’s from and you’ll get an exasperated answer: “I’m from all over the world!” Hand-in-hand with her global citizenship is the tendency to exclaim, “I love everybody in the world!” Isabel is open to meeting all types of people, right from the get-go. She displays a child-of-Earth doctrine that you’d expect to develop in an extroverted, third culture kid. How could it be any other way?
This is why my jaw dropped this morning when Isabel told me that she wished a certain country didn’t exist.
I just came back from 10 days alone in Singapore with this international, free-loving, dimpled girl of mine. Because Isabel walks and talks just like a grown-up, I could have been traveling with someone just a few years younger than me. A younger sibling, maybe.
Like two sisters, we went on photo walks together. We stalked Orchard Road, shooting the same scenes but from different angles. Isabel exposed facets of her personality through her photography: She dazzled me with her daring when she hopped on the slippery edge of a fountain to snag a shot of twinkling Christmas lights. And she warmed my heart when she ended a first-time meeting of two Indian-American girls by taking a series of selfies with her new friends. (I was instructed not to watch her take selfies, lest I embarrass her.) That’s my Isabel: adventurous, friendly, and increasingly independent.
During our photo walks, Isabel and I talked big life topics, just as I might with an adult sister. Yet, philosophical discussions with Isabel are never the same as those with grown-ups. With the razor sagacity that only kids seem to have, Isabel cuts through the crap of adulthood to deliver insight that is perhaps obvious but so right. Being there with Isabel is like having my own Chauncey Gardiner.
One cool night on the streets of Singapore, after Isabel and I finished belting out Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”, I was in the mood to philosophize: “Isabel,” I asked, “what do you think is the most important part about life?”
“The most important part of life is staying alive. Staying healthy, so you can live,” she said.
Her response, simple yet wise, reminded me of the emergency flight instructions we’ve heard one thousand times: “Secure your oxygen mask before helping others.” Everyone should know this. But somehow, our to-dos get jumbled, and we find ourselves with a Chex Party Mix of priorities — no order, no clear way forward. We might even completely ignore what matters the most and allow essentials to settle like sediment. (Or, to the continue the Chex Mix metaphor: like peanuts.)
I wanted Isabel to sort further the pretzels and cereal squares of life, so I said, “Isabel, what should a good person be like?”
“A good person should be kind and generous.” I am glad she gave that answer. I felt that, as a parent, I must be doing something right. Speaking with Isabel reminds me that what matters more than money and work are health and kindness. How often do we forget these truisms?
I look to Isabel for clarity when the dust and debris of everyday adulting cloud my thinking. Sometimes she reminds me that I’m a ‘lovely’ mom or how the problem pestering me now won’t matter later. Isabel’s words are little-kid wizardry: With a few short sentences, like a spell, she detangles the slip knots of my disillusioned adult brain.
But today, I asked her a philosophical question, and this time it didn’t yield the sort of response I’ve come to expect.
“Isabel,” I said, while toweling my hair dry, “what kind of changes do you think we need in this world to make Earth a better place?”
“I wish,” she said, “that China wasn’t a country.”
Whoa. I have never heard her make a statement so sweeping, so hateful. I put down my towel and turned to look right into her blue-green eyes, instead of relying on her reflection in the mirror. “What makes you say that, sweetie?” I asked.
“The people in China are cutting down the trees in Burma. So when it’s cold in Burma, it’s very, very cold. When it’s hot, it gets very, very hot! … And there’s a girl in my school, and she’s Chinese and she’s really mean. So I wish that China wasn’t a country. The people are bad.”
I had to take a minute before responding. Isabel didn’t know it, but these were words of racism. Racism? Coming from my intelligent, empathetic and global little girl? The same one who says she’s “from all over the world”? Wasn’t she signed up not to have these thoughts because of the lifestyle we are living? Wasn’t that the entire point? Wouldn’t it be … pretty much automatic?
I put on my parenting hat but felt unequipped in the moment. “There are over a billion people in China, Isabel. We have to look at each person as an individual.”
And I left the exchange there for the time being. I needed time to think.
She is only a child, so we might excuse Isabel’s remark about getting rid of China as being due to naiveté. But she isn’t that naive nor is she overly sheltered.
Isabel spent her first birthday on a houseboat in Kerala. Until age 4, she spoke with a thick Indian accent. She ate with her fingers, using Indian rotis to scoop up her food. Her hand gestures, too, were distinctly Indian in flavor. She even identified as Indian, despite being the only blonde, blue-eyed girl in class.
In Thailand, where we live currently, she sings the national anthem in Thai and eats like a Thai person, using spoons and forks but no knives. And though she recognizes she is half American, half Danish, she wants to study Korean to be able to communicate better with her peers. She recommends weekend trips to Laos; she goes to Danish class on Saturdays; and whenever she needs a password for her iPad, she asks me for her ‘passport.’
Without doubt, Isabel’s multicultural experiences have given her a worldview that is broader than that of many children — and many adults. Yet, all it took was a news snippet and one case of a mean girl at school for her to draw conclusions about an entire people.
It’s not enough to have seen the world to understand it. Neither frequent travel nor an expat lifestyle can fully inoculate against the fallacies of logic that lead to racist comments and thought. Confirmation bias, which is when we selectively choose new information to uphold existing beliefs, can lead to other erroneous, limiting and possibly dangerous lines of thinking beyond racism, too. And confirmation bias is what made Isabel decide Chinese people were bad. She slipped on an error of logic that happens all the time to humans, even the more careful among us.
As adults, we need to be scrupulous about what we think, what we say and how we say what we are thinking. We need to speak with precision, even if this means going against popular opinion, even if it makes us appear less cool or not as funny. We, as parents, teachers and adults in our communities, need to be critical thinkers who then teach children these skills. It means leading by example, and it means continual discussion about how we can think critically and clearly.
Expat parents: I’ve learned that giving your child an international lifestyle at an international school sadly will not lead to a true global citizen without your guidance. We can’t assume that a situation will take care of the hard work we need to do.
It’s possible that some of us made the same assumptions with what we expected of globalization. As the world began to shrink with advances in travel and technology, maybe we thought we would become more open-minded automatically through sheer force of exposure to other cultures.
But the recent election of leaders and the adoption of certain policies designed to shut out people reflect something else, perhaps: The world has been shrinking, and many minds and hearts are shriveling right along with it.
I have a request: Please reach into the bottom of your Chex Mix bag of thoughts and dig around for what has settled on the bottom. That’s what you’re neglecting but probably need to attend — and the sooner, the better. Found some peanuts? Good. I hope that some of them are critical thinking skills to buff and polish. And as we wade into a time when xenophobic thought is on the rise, we must reassess how we think and how we form our opinions.
Our children are more than a reflection of the lives they’re living. They have their own inner worlds and brain mechanics, and we can’t (and shouldn’t) control all of the impressions and people who will influence them. This is why they must learn how to think independently and critically.
So, I leave you with this thought: Now and then, do an intellectual check-in with your kids. Think about what beliefs they’re forming right under your nose. After all, sometimes children showcase brilliance with their simple gems of wisdom; other times, it’s precisely this simplicity that leads to perilous conclusions.
But first, as I am learning still, pay close attention to your own ways of thinking. Remember, as with so much in life, you need your own oxygen mask in place before helping others.
Shannon Frandsen, a writer, photographer and the editor-in-chief of Wanderlust Magazine in Thailand, grew up in Hyannis, Massachusetts. She lives in Bangkok with her husband and two daughters.
