Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds

by David C. Pollock

  “ You know, last year we had to hide on the floor for four days because of typhoons.”

  “We couldn’t go out of our house in Sri Lanka for a week when everybody in town started fighting.”

  “On our vacation last month we got to ride on the backs of elephants and go look for tigers.”

  “Well, so did we!” countered another seven-year-old from across the room. “We saw six tigers. How many did you see?”

  And so it went.

  Eventually new Year’s Day came up as part of a story. We asked what we thought was a simple question. “When is new Year’s Day?” Instead of the simple “January 1” that we expected, many different dates were given—each young tck trying to defend how and when it was celebrated in his or her host country. We knew that if we had asked most traditional groups of five- to twelve-year-olds in the United States about new Year’s Day, this discussion wouldn’t be occurring. Most of them probably would have no idea that new Year’s Day could be dates other than January 1.

  This may seem like a small detail, but already these children are learning how big and interesting the world they live in is and how much there will be to discover about it all through life. Many readers may not know that Henry Robinson Luce was an ATCK born and raised in China until he first set foot in the United States at age 15. He founded Time magazine in 1923 and Life magazine in 1936. He couldn’t find enough international news in local publications, so he decided to fix the problem by starting these publications.2

  Interestingly, many of today’s commentators in print and on cable news channels are also TCKs or other versions of CCKs with global childhoods. Fareed Zakaria, born in India, spent time as a foreign student in, and ultimately immigrated to, the United States. He has become an award-winning author and commentator on international relationships and policies. In a column he wrote for Newsweek, Zakaria states:

  I’ve spent my life acquiring formal expertise on foreign policy. I’ve got fancy degrees, have run research projects, taught in colleges and graduate schools . . . I couldn’t do my job without the expertise . . . [but] my biography [of living in countries outside his own during his formative years] has helped me put my book learning in context, made for a richer interaction with foreigners and helped me see the world from many angles.3

  Zakaria goes on to talk about the need to develop deeper understandings of other countries than our own and concludes, “There are many ways to attain this, but certainly being able to feel it in your bones is one powerful way.”4

  CHALLENGE: CONFUSED LOYALTIES

  Although their expanded worldview is a great benefit, it can also leave TCKs with a sense of confusion about such complex things as politics, patriotism, and values. Should they support the policies of their home country when those policies are detrimental to their host country? Or should they support the host country even if it means opposing policies of their own government?

  Joe, the American ATCK raised in Argentina and educated in a British school who was introduced in chapter 4, writes about divided loyalties:

  When I came to the U.S., there was the matter of pledging allegiance to the American flag. I had saluted the union Jack, the Argentine flag, and now I was supposed to swear loyalty to a country which, in 1955, didn’t even have decent pizza or coffee. Worse, Americans, many of them, were still mccarthyites at heart, and feared anything tainted with foreignisms.

  The unfortunate side effects of a multicultural upbringing are substantial, of course. Whose side are you on? I had a dickens of a time with my loyalties during the islas Malvinas war (no, make that the Falkland islands war). After all, as an eleven-year-old I had sworn undying fealty to Juan Domingo Peron and his promise that he would free the Malvinas from British enslavement. After the army booted him out of Argentina, I figured I was off the hook. But could I really be sure? On the other hand, I whistled “Rule Britannia” at least three times a week and really felt proud to know that a massive British force was headed to the Falklands and that British sovereignty would be asserted, unequivocally. I was dismayed by the profound indifference to this war exhibited by Americans.5

  Confused loyalties can make TCKs seem unpatriotic and arrogant to their fellow citizens. If Joe is a good American, how could he ever pledge allegiance to Argentina and Britain—or be angry with his own country for not getting involved in someone else’s war? If British TCKs who grew up in India try to explain negative remnants of the colonial era to fellow classmates in England, they can seem like traitors. Australian children in Indianapolis schools have been rebuked for refusing to pledge allegiance to the American flag each morning, even though they have stood respectfully during that daily ritual.

  In Homesick: My Own Story, Jean Fritz writes of her experiences as an American TCK in China during the 1920s. She attended a British school in China but defiantly refused to sing “God Save the King” because it wasn’t hernational anthem. She was an American, although she had never spent a day in the United States in her life. Throughout the growing turmoil that led to the revolution in 1927, Jean dreamed of her grandmother’s farm and garden in Pennsylvania, fantasizing over and over about what it would be like to live and go to school in America. Finally, after what seemed like an endless boat ride and many struggles, Jean arrived at that long-awaited first day in an American school. Here’s what happened.

  “The class will come to order,” she [Miss Crofts, the teacher] said. “I will call the roll.” When she came to my name, Miss Crofts looked up from her book. “Jean Guttery is new to our school,” she said. “she has come all the way from china where she lived beside the Yangs-Ta-Zee River. Isn’t that right, Jean?”

  “It’s pronounced Yang-see,” I corrected. “there are just two syllables.”

  Miss Crofts looked at me coldly. “in America,” she said, “we say Yangs-Ta-Zee.”

  I was working myself up, madder by the minute, when I heard Andrew Carr, the boy behind me, shifting his feet on the floor. I guess he must have hunched across his desk, because all at once I heard him whisper over my shoulder:

  “Chink, Chink, Chinaman

  Sitting on a fence,

  Trying to make a dollar

  Out of fifteen cents.”

  I forgot all about where I was. I jumped to my feet, whirled around, and spoke out loud as if there were no Miss Crofts, as if I’d never been in a classroom before, as if I knew nothing about classroom behavior. “You don’t call them Chinamen or Chinks,” I cried. “You call them Chinese. Even in America you call them Chinese.”

  “Well, you don’t need to get exercised, Jean,” she [Miss Crofts] said. “We all know that you are American.”

  “But that’s not the point!” before I could explain that it was an insult to call Chinese people Chinamen, Miss Crofts had tapped her desk with a ruler.

  “That will be enough,” she said. “All eyes front.”6

  Which country had Jean’s greatest loyalty and devotion—the United States or China? Did she know? All her life she had thought of herself as American,yet now here she was defending the Chinese. Certainly Miss Crofts and Jean’s classmates couldn’t understand why she would want to defend a people and a country halfway around the world from them—particularly at the expense of getting along with people from her own country. Because Jean physically looked like her classmates, those around her had no idea that Jean had spent her life studying about the Chinese culture and people and that throughout her life people from that world had been her playmates and friends.

  More difficult than the questions of political or patriotic loyalties, however, are the value dissonances that occur in the cross-cultural experience. As we said earlier, TCKs often live among cultures with strongly conflicting value systems. One culture says female circumcision is wrong. Another one says female circumcision is the most significant Moment in a girl’s life; it is when she knows she has become an accepted member of her tribe. One culture says abortion is wrong; another says it is all right for specific reasons up to certain poi
nts in the pregnancy. Still other cultures practice abortion based on the gender of the baby: males are wanted; females are not.

  In each situation, which value is right? Which is wrong? Is there a right and wrong? If so, who or what defines them? Conflicting values cannot be operational at the same time in the same place. How do TCKs decide from all they see around them what their own values will and won’t be? Deciding on what are the core personal beliefs and values we will hold on to no matter where we are compared to understanding what are simply cultural differences is an important task for everyone in the process of developing a sense of personal identity. For TCKs, however, it can be a special challenge.

  This expanded worldview and its resulting confusion of loyalties and values can be a greater problem for those who return to cultures that remain relatively homogenous. In a study of Turkish TCKs, Steve Eisinger discovered that “the statistics regarding public opinion . . . Indicate that this expanded worldview may not be necessarily viewed as a positive characteristic.”7 In appendix B, Japanese researcher Momo Kano Podolsky describes how Japanese TCKs, or kikoku-shijo, were originally looked down on in the early days of their returning to Japan. While that opinion has now been reversed in Japan, the new ideas that the TCKs bring back, and their refusal to follow unthinkingly the cultural patterns of preceding generations, can sometimes make them unwelcome citizens in their own countries—whatever that country and culture might be.

  Three-Dimensional View of the World versus Painful View of Reality

  BENEFIT: THREE-DIMENSIONAL VIEW OF THE WORLD

  As TCKs live in various cultures, they not only learn about cultural differences, but they also experience the world in a tangible way that is impossible to do by reading books, seeing movies, or watching nightly newscasts alone. Because they have lived in so many places, smelled so many smells, heard so many strange sounds, and been in so many strange situations, throughout their lives when they read a story in the newspaper or watch it on TV, the flat, odorless images there transform into an internal 3-D panoramic picture show. It’s almost as if they were there in person smelling the smells, tasting the tastes, perspiring with the heat. They may not be present at the event, but they have a clear awareness of what is going on and what it is like for those who are there.

  Each summer Dave Pollock led transition seminars for TCKs. During one of these, he asked the attendees, “What comes to your mind if I say the word riot?” the answers came back, “Paris,” “Korea,” “Iran” “Ecuador.”

  Next question. “Any details?”

  More answers: “Broken windows.” “Water cannons.” “Burned buses.” “Tear gas, mobs.” “Burning tires.”

  Burning tires. Who would think about burning tires except somebody who had smelled that stench?

  “Tacks.”

  Anyone might think of guns in a riot, but why tacks? Because this TCK had seen tacks spread on the streets of Ecuador to flatten tires, so people couldn’t travel during a riot. It makes sense, but probably only someone who had seen it would name it.

  Having a 3-D view of the world is a useful skill not only for reading stories but for writing them. For TCKs who like to write, their culturally rich and highly mobile childhoods give them a true breadth of hands-on experiences in many places to add life to their work. Pearl S. Buck and John Hersey were among the first ATCKs who recorded in words the world they had known as children growing up in China. In a feature article for Time called “The Empire Writes Back,” Pico Iyer gives an account of an entirely new genre of award-winning authors, all of whom have cross-cultural backgrounds.

  Authors from Britain’s former colonies have begun to capture the very heart of English literature, transforming the canon with bright colors and strange cadences and foreign eyes. They are revolutionizing the language from within. Hot spices are entering English, and tropical birds . . . Magical creations from the makers of a new World Fiction.8

  Iyer goes on to describe the great diversity of each writer’s background and then states,

  But the new transcultural writers are something different. For one, they are the products not so much of colonial division as of the international culture that has grown up since the war, and they are addressing an audience as mixed up and eclectic and uprooted as themselves.9

  Without ever using, or perhaps even knowing, the term third culture kids, Iyer has conveyed vividly the richness of their experience. In the last few years, the ranks of TCK authors have swelled. Beside Pico Iyer and his book The Global Soul, the list now includes such names as Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns), William Paul Young (The Shack), and the many books of Isabel Allende, including My Invented Country.

  CHALLENGE: PAINFUL AWARENESS OF REALITY

  With this three-dimensional view of the world, however, comes the painful reality that behind the stories in the news are real flesh-and-blood people—not merely flat faces on a TV screen. When an airplane crashes in India or a tsunami rips the coasts of Thailand, TCKs find it appalling that their local evening newscasters seem to focus mainly on how many citizens of their particular country died— almost as if the other lives lost didn’t matter. As they watch an empty-eyed woman and desperate man search vainly for their child amid the rubble of an earthquake in China, ATCKs know that loss is as painful as their own would be if they were in that situation. Many of them know that when bombs drop on Baghdad or Beirut, people scream with fear and horror there just as they did on September 11, 2001, when airplanes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

  Many TCKs have seen war or faced the pain of evacuation and its disruption. For some it has happened in their host cultures. In others, it has happened in their passport culture. Either way, with this global lifestyle, they are often an ocean apart from their families at times of great political and social upheaval or even natural disasters. A special hardship is that others around them may have no idea why a war or an earthquake drifting by on the scrolling news line on CNN makes such a difference to this TCK or ATCK.

  As a child, Samar grew up as a Lebanese citizen living in Liberia and attended a U.S.-based international school. Her father had a thriving business until the civil war in Liberia began. After her family fled back to Lebanon, more civil unrest hit that land and they then immigrated to France. In time, Samar and her family returned to Lebanon and lived amid the continuing tensions there. Eventually, Samar married her Lebanese sweetheart, Khaled, and they moved to the United States while Khaled finished a medical residency program. Samar made friends with local citizens and pushed her new baby’s stroller while walking with other young Moms in the park. Within these social interactions, they all appeared to be living similar lifestyles.

  Then the unrest in Lebanon flared up once more. While the other Moms continued talking about the color of their kitchen curtains and making playdates for their children, Samar suddenly lost interest in such discussions. Her life became centered on CNN and MSNBC, trying to figure out from the onscreen images how close the fighting was to her parents’ home. Every thunderstorm made her want to hide, because it reminded her of the sounds of war in both Liberia and Lebanon. She found herself resenting her newfound friends for their seeming lack of interest not only in her family, but in all those others who suffered because governments had chosen to wage their wars where real people like her and her family lived.

  Cross-Cultural Enrichment versus Ignorance of the Home Culture

  BENEFIT: CROSS-CULTURAL ENRICHMENT

  TCKs and ATCKs usually have a sense of ownership and interest in cultures other than just that of their passport country. They set their Internet home - pages to receive news from the places they’ve lived. They enjoy aspects of the host culture others might not appreciate. While the smell of the Southeast Asian fruit durian would precipitate a gag reflex in most of us, TCKs who grew up in Malaysia inhale the scent with glee, for it is the smell of home. Those who grew up in India use chapatis to pick up the hottest curry sauce. Still other TCKs a
nd ATCKs sit cross-legged on the floor whenever they have a choice between that and a lounge chair. They consider these aspects of their lifestyle part of the wealth of their heritage.

  Perhaps more important than what they have learned to enjoy from the more surface layers of other cultures, however, is the fact that most TCKs have gained valuable lessons from the deeper levels as well. They have lived in other places long enough to learn to appreciate the reasons and understanding behind some of the behavioral differences rather than simply being frustrated by them as visitors tend to be. For example, while a tourist might feel irritated that the stores close for two hours in the middle of the day just when he or she wants to go shopping, most TCKs can understand that this custom not only helps people survive better if the climate is extremely hot, but it’s a time when parents greet the children as they return from school and spend time together as a family. Many TCKs learn to value relationships above convenience as they live in such places, and it is a gift they carry with them wherever they may later go.