Meanwhile, our parents fought desperately to keep some semblance of Americanism at home. They lost the battle of the crossed 7s. They lost the spelling battle. Worse, when they were told that in a given year there would be a focus on North American history, geography, and literature, they discovered, to their dismay, North America meant Canada.13
It isn’t only Americans going to British-oriented schools who struggle. Some of the most difficult situations are those of children who are from non-English-speaking countries who go to American or other English-oriented schools. One Norwegian girl who attended such a school writes,
Norway became my well-kept secret. I was a fiercely patriotic little girl, and every May 17 I would insist on celebrating Norway’s independence day. My American classmates had their Thanksgiving and Halloween parties. I was never invited, except for once, when I left the party in tears because I didn’t understand the English in the video they were watching. Little did it help that we had a teacher from Texas who taught us U.S. History that year. When I put Florida on the wrong side of the map she scolded me for it. That memory is still very vivid in my mind. I was forced to hear about the wonders of America, and no one cared to hear about Norway. No one seemed to care that English wasn’t my first language, and the school wouldn’t give us time to learn Norwegian during school hours—we had to study Norwegian during our vacations. I used to think that was really unfair.14
If school is a place for learning the values as well as the behavior of culture, what happens when children attend a school with completely different customs, values, or religious orientation from that of their parents? What happens when the basic educational needs (e.g., “correct” spelling, penmanship, math processes, language) required for success in their passport cultures aren’t taught in the school they attend? This often occurs for globally nomadic families when the choices for schools that teach the academic curriculum of their home country may be limited to schools based on a belief system or in a language that doesn’t match their own. Even something like the style of teaching—such as rote versus inductive methods—can add to the stress of learning.
TCKs who go to boarding school experience another distinct subculture twenty-four hours a day rather than only during school. Without question, different rules are needed to organize scores of children in a dormitory environment rather than two or three in a home. Some TCKs talk of being raised by their peers more than by adults in such a setting. Some consider this the most positive thing about boarding school; others say it was the most difficult. Either way, it is a different experience from going to a day school and returning to parents each night.
PEERS
When children play together, they instinctively parrot the cultural rules they have been taught: “You’re cheating!” “Don’t be a sissy!” “You made a great play!” They reflect what is considered to be, or not to be, in style. “Why are you wearing that ugly shirt?” “Wow! I really like your coat.” Children enforce the cultural norms of a community as they shame or praise one another in this way.
Most TCKs attend school and play with peers from many cultures—each culture valuing different things. Some friends practically live and die for soccer and cricket; others love American football and baseball. Some children are raised to believe that academic success is the highest priority; others value peer relationships over high grades. Styles of relationship can be very different. Males holding hands in one culture is a common expression of friendship. In another, it may have connotations related to sexual preference. How does a child decide which is “correct”?
While virtually all children learn culture from their parents, community, school, and peers, TCKS often have two additional sources of cultural input: caregivers and sponsoring agencies.
CAREGIVERS
Like children all over the world, some TCKs are left with a caregiver while their parents work or socialize. While caregivers in the home culture generally share the parents’ basic language and cultural outlook, TCKs are often cared for by members of the host culture who may only speak their national language. A German child being cared for by a Scottish nanny in Aberdeen will likely hear no German during the time they spend together.
Methods of child care in various cultures can be radically different. Instead of being pushed in a pram, Russian children raised in Niger will be carried on their African nanny’s back until they can walk. Shaming may be the main method of training a child in the host culture rather than a more praise-based type of approach in the home culture or vice versa.
Caregivers, like all of us, inevitably reflect their culture’s attitude toward children and life. The story goes that when Pearl Buck was a child in China, someone asked how she compared her mother to her Chinese amah. Buck replied, “If I want to have a story read, I go to my mother. But if I fall down and need to be comforted, I go to my amah.” Her mother’s culture valued teaching and learning, while her amah’s placed a greater value on nurture. Even as a child, Buck instinctively knew the difference.
SPONSORING AGENCIES
In addition to the home and host cultures, many TCKs are also shaped not only by the overall expatriate community, but also by the subcommunity—missionary, business, military, diplomatic corps—in which they grow. Each of these groups also has its own subculture and clear expectations of behavior. In Military Brats, Mary Edwards Wertsch writes,
Certainly by the time a military child is five years old, the values and rules of military life have been thoroughly internalized, the military identity forged, and the child has already assumed an active stage presence as an understudy of the Fortress theater company.15
Whatever the rules are in any TCK’s given subculture—be they matters of correct dress, correct faith, or correct political views—TCKs know that to be an accepted member of that group, they must conform to those standards.
Many of these sponsoring agencies have, or have had in the past, special behavioral or philosophical expectations of not only their employees but the employees’ families as well. This may result in situations that wouldn’t happen to friends living in traditional settings in the passport culture. Two examples follow.
• A child’s indiscretions (such as spraying graffiti on the wall of a public building) in a foreign service community might cause a major diplomatic rift with the host culture and force the parent to be re-assigned to another country, while that same behavior wouldn’t cause a ripple in a parent’s career if it happened in a suburban community in the home country.
• In the military, if a parent doesn’t come in for a teacher-parent conference, the teacher can speak with the parent’s officer-in-charge and the officer will require the parent to come in. If a military child does something as serious as getting drunk in school or setting off a firecracker, for example, he or she might be sent back to the home country, the parent won’t be promoted that year, and the incident goes on the parent’s permanent record.
One more point about organizational subcultures: often we forget to look at how the underlying dominant or national culture of the sponsoring agency itself may affect TCKs, particularly those who come from a different culture. If a corporation’s CEO and high-level managers who make the decisions on policies that affect an employee’s family (such as how often or how long leave time is) are all from England, they often unthinkingly base their decisions on plans that coincide with the British school year, without taking into account the realities for an employee who comes from the United States, for instance. Look at Ilpö’s story to see what a major effect one factor alone—schooling options—can have on a TCK’s life.
Ruth Van Reken met Ilpö, a Finnish TCK who had grown up in Taiwan, while he was finishing his medical residency program at the University of Chicago. He had completed all his post-secondary school education in the United States, including medical school. She asked why he had chosen to come to the United States rather than returning to school in Finland.
“Well, it sort of just happened,” Ilpö replied. “
My folks taught in a seminary in Taiwan, but the other missionaries were from America and Norway. Even though the curriculum for our little mission school was supposedly an international one, we had an American teacher, so all our classes were in English.” Ilpö went on to explain how at age twelve he had gone to the American boarding school in Taichung and had lived in a small dorm run by the Finnish mission. Although he spoke Finnish in the dorm, his classes and interactions with fellow students took place in English.
It was about this time that Ilpö faced his first cultural crisis. If he had been in Finland, after ninth grade he would have competed with all other Finnish students in a special test to decide who could continue their academic schooling and who would go to a trade or vocational school. When the time came for Ilpö to take that exam, he encountered a major problem. His education had been in English and the exam was in Finnish. Although he spoke Finnish fluently with his family, his written language skills in that language and his knowledge of the curriculum content from which the tests came were deficient. Ilpö knew he wanted to be a doctor, but if he went back and competed with students who had been studying in Finnish schools, the chances of his scoring high enough to attend university were slim.
Ultimately, he felt his only option was to attend university in the United States within the educational system he knew. But that also meant he had to stay in the U.S. For medical training, because in Finland medical training is combined with what would be considered undergraduate studies in the United States.
When Ruth asked Ilpö where he expected to live after his training, he said it would be very difficult to go back to Finland. Not only was their system different, but he didn’t know medical vocabulary in Finnish. Even if he learned that, fellow physicians would look down on him because he had trained somewhere else. When asked how he felt about that, Ilpö said, “That’s what I’m coming to grips with now. I didn’t realize before how nearly impossible it would be ever to return to Finland. It’s a choice that slipped out of my hands. I feel like my world slipped away.”
TCKs in Relationship to Surrounding Dominant Culture
Because we learn our sense of personal and cultural identity in relationship to the world around us, there is another aspect of cross-cultural living that has a significant influence on a TCK’s life—the changing nature of how he or she fundamentally relates to the surrounding dominant or majority culture, be that the home or host culture.
TCKs not only experience many cultural worlds in their developmental years, but they also physically move from place to place where the dominant cultures may be quite different. Thus, their identity is constantly being redefined in contrast or comparison to whichever world they are currently in. This is one of the key things we must understand in order to recognize how some of the “new normals” created by our globalizing world impact not only TCKs but children and families everywhere.
In the early 1990s, Barb Knuckles, a non-TCK friend of Ruth’s, planted a vital seed in her mind. In a discussion of TCKs, Barb said, “I think there’s a simple reason they have so many problems on reentry to their passport culture. In the host country, they are often seen as different. They can always console themselves that, yes, they are different, but it’s because they aren’t from this place. They see themselves as members of their passport country. The problem is when they go back to their passport country and still don’t fit, what is their excuse?”
That seed grew after Ruth met two TCKs who were having almost classic reentry experiences—but they were having them in their host cultures! On wondering why this was so, she realized the only common factor for both of them was that in their host cultures they physically looked like members of the dominant culture. After sharing her thoughts with Dave, they batted these ideas back and forth and wound up with the model shown in Figure 4-3.
• Foreigner—look different, think different. In the early days of international mobility, most TCKs related to their host culture as foreigners, and many still do today. They differ from those in the dominant culture around them in both appearance and worldview. They know, and others know, they are not from this place. The visible layer of culture accurately reflects the invisible. What you expect is what you get.
Figure 4-3 PolVan Cultural Identity Box
(© 1996 David C. Pollock/Ruth E. Van Reken)
• Hidden immigrant—look alike, think different Norma McCaig and Dave began using the term in the mid-1980s to describe the experience of TCKs returning to their passport culture. TCKs can also be hidden immigrants when they are growing up in host countries where they physically resemble most of the citizens of that country. Internally, however, these TCKs—whether in the passport culture or host culture—view life through a lens that is as different from the dominant or majority culture as any obvious foreigner. People around them, of course, presume they share similar worldviews and cultural awareness because, from outward appearances, they look as if they belong to the group. No one makes the same allowances for the TCKs’ lack of cultural knowledge or miscues as they would an obvious immigrant or recognized foreigner. What you expect is not what you get.
• Adopted—look different, think alike This category can literally relate to international adoptees and other immigrants who may not physically resemble members of the dominant culture but have lived there long enough to assimilate culturally to that place. This is, however, another common pattern of relationship for TCKs. Sometimes they appear physically different from members of the surrounding dominant host culture, but they have lived there so long and immersed themselves so deeply in this environment that their behavior and worldview are virtually the same as members of that culture. The TCKs may feel very comfortable and often more “at home” in this situation than in their passport country, and they feel wounded when others treat them as foreigners. This sense of being misperceived can also happen when ATCKs return to visit the place where they grew up. Suddenly they realize for the first time how “foreign” others see them to be when they feel this is, indeed, the world of their heart. Again, what you expect is not what you get.
• Mirror—look alike, think alike. This is the traditional pattern of those raised in a monocultural situation. While many TCKs feel there is nowhere in the world they fit as “mirrors,” the truth is some TCKs grow up where they physically resemble the members of the dominant culture in the host culture. At times, they have lived there so long that they have adopted the deeper levels of that culture as well. No one would realize they aren’t from this place unless they show their passports. TCKs who return to their home culture after spending only a year or two away or who were away only at a very young age may also fit in this category. Although they have lived abroad, their deeper levels of culture have remained rooted solidly in the home culture and they identify with it completely. And one other slight irony: perhaps in an international school where there is no standard of “look alike,” TCKs find that they are mirrors to one another in the deeper places of culture where they reflect back to one another a shared understanding of what it is to grow up globally. At any rate, this is a comfortable box to be in. What you expect is what you get.
Non-TCK children and adults also may fall into one or another of these boxes at any given time, but the difference for TCKs is that throughout childhood they are constantly changing boxes depending on where they happen to be. They may be obvious foreigners one day and hidden immigrants the next. Many TCKs do not make a simple move from one culture to another; instead, they are in a repetitive cycle of traveling back and forth between home and host cultures throughout childhood. But why does that matter? Because as they move in and out of various cultures, TCKs not only have to learn new cultural rules, but more fundamentally, they must understand who they are in relationship to the surrounding culture. Each move is also a question of identity: How do I fit in? Where do I belong? As they see themselves constantly changing in relationship to others, it can be difficult to develop a true sense of a core identity.
Ther
e is one other interesting question to raise here. In appendix B, Japanese researcher and ATCK herself, Momo Kano Podolsky, makes some interesting observations comparing how the Japanese have studied children who have been raised globally and how those in the Western world have done the same. In Japan, this experience has been a well-known phenomenon almost from the earliest days when Japanese businesspeople began taking their families overseas. This traditionally monocultural society didn’t know what to do with these children when they returned from abroad because they no longer fit easily in the prescribed boxes. The government itself became involved as they had to make changes in the school structures so these returnees could better fit back into Japanese society.
During one of their first conversations, Momo asked Ruth how the increasing number of TCKs had impacted the culture of the United States. Frankly, Ruth had never thought about that before and she told Momo she couldn’t imagine this had ever been a topic high on any governmental agenda in the U.S. Momo then said, “I noticed one thing. In Japan we studied this topic to see what it had done to our culture. In the United States, you studied it to see what it had done to the individual.” While they both laughed in realizing how even an approach to studying the impact of the global experiences of children had been shaped by their basic collectivistic versus individualistic worldviews, it raises a question to ponder. In her essay, Momo relates how originally kikoku-shijo, returned Japanese TCKs, were seen as a threat to the culture. Now they are valued. It would be interesting to see how the fact that their experience is far more visible and valued by the surrounding dominant culture plays out in terms of the way they do or don’t relate to these patterns of cultural identity we discussed here.
Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds Page 8