“I came and found my home village desolate. Only fallen leaves over the garden fence.”

This poem by the 18–19th century Zen Buddhist monk, poet, and calligrapher, Ryōkan, aptly describes how I felt in 2016 when my family moved back to the States after living some ten years overseas. Mind you, I did not find my birth city of La Mesa literally desolate, but rather it was my very concept of ‘home town’ that was brought to ruin. It had been easy to say, “Ah yes, I’m from San Diego, California” while I lived abroad, but now that I was back, I quickly began to realize that I was not, in fact, San Diegan. Nor Californian. Nor even American. My culture, values, and identity were so far apart from those around me, that I started to feel like a foreigner, lost in a strange land–despite it being the land of my birth. I came to realize that after spending so many of my formative years in different places and among different peoples, I had drifted apart from my peers who had remained in the States. And this drove me to feel overwhelmingly alone. Where did I belong? Did I have a home? What did it mean to be ‘from’ somewhere? These questions swirled around my mind as I struggled to apprehend my place in the world.

To help provide some background, here’s an overview of my story:

As I mentioned, I was born in the city of La Mesa, San Diego County, and lived there until I was four years old. It was then that my parents became missionaries, and we moved to the distant land of Tanzania. We lived for around five years in East Africa, mostly Tanzania but also a couple of shorter stints in Kenya. When that time came to a close, me being ten years old, our family moved to yet another distant land: Ireland. We remained there in County Waterford for four years. Then, we at long last repatriated to the States, back to San Diego, California. Just in time for me to start high school.

And so by the time I was fourteen years old, I’d lived in four different countries across three continents. So what did that make me? As I already said, I felt I clearly wasn’t American. Anyone and everyone would laugh me off if I claimed to be Tanzanian or Kenyan. And even if I tried saying I was Irish, I knew that the Irish would never claim me. I was in a limbo; I felt like a cultural nomad or vagabond, a sojourner with no home to call my own.

I would later come to find there is a term for my situation: Third Culture Kid (TCK). In 1989, over thirty years ago, David Pollock defined the TCK as “a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture” (Pollock 15). He further explained that “the TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership of any” (Pollock 16). And while “elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is [often] in relationship to others of similar background.” The ‘Third Culture’ part of the term actually refers to this shared experience of TCKs. The idea is that the parents’ culture is the ‘First Culture,’ the culture of the country or region they move to is the ‘Second Culture,’ and then the Third Culture is a kind of neither/nor world; it is the “shared commonalities of those living an internationally mobile lifestyle” (Pollock 17). The idea that TCKs around the world, regardless of passport country, host country, and so forth can share a kind of culture of their own, just because of their similar lifestyles, first sounded rather far-fetched to me. But as I’ve learned about these shared experiences and met TCKs from around the globe, I’ve come to realize just how amazing and true it is. Meeting people like me, who belong everywhere and nowhere, has helped me to feel like maybe I do have a people after all.

So what are the shared experiences of the TCK? Well, the two overarching realities shared by TCKs everywhere are: being raised in a cross-cultural world and being raised in a highly mobile world. The first part means that we grew up traveling between two or more different cultures–whether that was when we flew back and forth between countries, or just going from the culture of our parents in the household to the culture of our friends at school or in the neighbourhood. The second part relates to the constant coming and going, either of the TCK themself, or of the people around them. As a missionary kid, not only did I shift into different spheres of relationships every time my family moved, but even while we remained somewhere often other missionaries and friends in our community were coming and going. This idea of ‘high mobility’ is one of the factors that distinguishes the TCK experience from that of an immigrant kid. While certainly there is plenty of crossover in the two, traditionally immigrants move to a new country with the plan of staying long-term or permanently, while the TCK has an expectation of eventual repatriation, or perhaps another move to yet a new country. As the world is becoming more and more globalized, and it’s becoming more common for families to travel and move around regularly, some of this is changing, and perhaps the two experiences are drawing closer together. But as my childhood fits into the traditional idea of the TCK, I will focus on that experience as I can attest to from my own life.

While I feel very grateful for my international childhood and see many benefits of it–such as an ability to quickly adapt to new environments, navigate cross-cultural communication, make connections with people around the world, and feel ‘at home’ just about anywhere–I also have come more recently to see how some of my hardships are attributed to it as well. My constant longing for belonging, my innate sense of relationships as impermanent and doomed to fade away, and my feelings of uneasiness and restlessness in the country that’s ‘supposed’ to be my home–to name a few. Not that people who didn’t grow up TCKs don’t experience these feelings as well, but I think my background has certainly deepened and implanted those thoughts, and indeed they are very common to TCKs around the globe. Alizée Chaudey, a TCK journalist, writes in an article for Peacock Magazine, “one of the struggles of being a third culture kid is developing a sense of belonging, of commitment and attachment to one culture or to another.” This often leads to feeling ‘culturally homeless.’ Chaudey continues, “culturally homeless individuals often experience confusion over their identity, especially because the third culture kid is frequently abroad during the adolescent development years when identity is most solidified psychologically.” I can certainly relate to this myself as I’ve struggled with being a cultural nomad, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

Here’s a metaphor to help explain:

It’s as if the whole world were my house, my ‘home.’ It’s a wonderful thing because this means I’m free to walk through the various halls and visit the many rooms, enjoying the unique charm of each room and the beauty of the house as a whole. But at the same time, none of these rooms are mine. I can visit them, but at the end of the day when it’s time to go to sleep–where do I lay my head? I’m left to be a hall-dweller, living in between worlds, roaming here and there and stopping for a while, but at the end of the day I have nowhere to call my own. This feeling of displacement is especially pungent in the States, because this is where I’m supposedly ‘from.’ It’s one thing to be obviously out of place, a sojourner in a foreign land, but to feel this way in the country I was born in, the country where my parents are from and my citizenship resides, is another matter.

I spent my Junior year of college studying abroad in Japan–my crosscultural childhood seemingly having led me to pursue the study of another foreign culture and language into my adulthood–and one of the questions people kept asking me was, “what was the biggest culture shock?” But the only potentially shocking thing is that there wasn’t any. If anything, I felt infinitely more at peace and at home in Japan than I had for the past six years being back in America. While it’s tempting to attribute this to me having some special connection with Japanese culture and to dare to hope that maybe I’ve found a home at last, I think really it’s just that I feel more in my element being an obvious ‘outsider’ like I was growing up than I do being a ‘hidden’ one. I have more freedom to enjoy learning the culture and customs of the people because I’m not expected to already know them. It’s like if a math major took an algebra test and a history test–he’d probably feel less pressured to do well on the history test because he’s not expected to know as much. And so, while there is no place I can truly call home, I can say for certain that I feel more at ease outside of the States than I do in. Whether I’ll ever be able to settle anywhere or I’ll continue to wander forever I’m not sure. But I do take solace in knowing that I am not alone in my experience, and regardless of physical location, perhaps I do have a place among those who can relate to my global nomad life.

Bibliography

Bushong, Lois J, et al. Belonging Everywhere & Nowhere : Insights into Counseling the Globally Mobile. Indianapolis, Indiana, Mango Tree Intercultural Services, Lexington, Ky, 2013.

Kazuaki Tanahashi. Sky Above, Great Wind : The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan. Boston, Shambhala, 2012.

“Peacock Magazine Spring 2018 by the Peacock Magazine — Issuu.” Issuu.com, 29 Apr. 2018.

‌Pollock, David C, et al. Third Culture Kids : Growing up among Worlds. Boston, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2017.