BENEFIT: LESS PREJUDICE
The opportunity to know people from diverse backgrounds as friends—not merely as acquaintances—and within the context of their own cultural milieu is another gift TCKs receive. They have been members of groups that include a striking collection of culturally and ethnically diverse people, and most have the ability to truly enjoy such diversity and to believe that people of all backgrounds can be full and equal participants in any given situation. Sometimes their unconscious, underlying assumptions that people of all backgrounds are still just that—people—can surprise others, and the TCKs in turn are surprised that this isn’t necessarily “normal” for everyone else.
One white ATCK living in the suburban United States had an African American repairman arrive to fix a leaky faucet. As the repairman prepared to leave, he said, “I can tell you’ve been around black people a lot, haven’t you?” since the ATCK had grown up in africa, she had to agree, but asked, “Why do you say that?” He replied, “because you’re comfortable with me being here. A lot of white people aren’t.” and she was surprised because she hadn’t been thinking about racial relationships at all. To her, they had simply been talking about fixing faucets and paying the bill.
TCKs who use their cross-cultural experiences well learn there is always a reason behind anyone’s behavior—no matter how mystifying it appears—and may be more patient than others might be in a particular situation to try to understand what is going on.
When ATCK Anne-Marie returned to Mali as a United Nations worker, she heard other expatriates complaining that the Malians who worked in the local government hospital never planned ahead. The medicine, oxygen, or other vital commodities were always completely gone before anyone reported that it was time to reorder. This had caused endless frustration for the UN workers.
While listening to the usual grumbling during morning tea one day soon after she arrived, Anne-Marie interrupted the flow of complaints. “I understand your annoyance,” she said, “but did it ever occur to you what it’s like to be so poor you can only worry about each particular day’s needs? if you haven’t got enough money for today, you certainly aren’t worrying about storing up for tomorrow.”
Of all the gifts we hear TCKs say they have received from their backgrounds, the richness and breadth of diversity among those they truly count as friends is one they consistently mention among the greatest.
CHALLENGE: MORE PREJUDICE
Unfortunately, however, there are a few TCKs who appear to become more prejudiced rather than less. There may be several reasons for this. Perhaps it is because historically many TCKs’ parents were part of what others considered a special, elite group (such as diplomats or high-ranking military personnel) in the host country. The parent’s position often brought special deference, and the children had little contact with the local population outside of servants in the home or the drivers who took them to school or shopping. In such situations, a sense of entitlement and superiority over the host nationals can easily grow.
The movie Empire of the Sun gives a clear picture of what this privileged lifestyle has been for some TCKs. The story opens with the scene of a young British lad being driven home from school in the back seat of a chauffeured limousine while he stares uncaringly out the windows at starving Chinese children on the streets. As he enters his home, the young man begins to order the Chinese servants around as if they were his slaves.
One day all is changed. When the British boy tries to tell the maid what to do, she runs up and slaps him. The revolution has come, and years of suppressed bitterness at his treatment of her erupt. It takes World War II and several years of incarceration in a concentration camp before this TCK finally understands that the world is not completely under his control.
While this may seem like an exaggeration in today’s world, when adults from any expatriate community constantly speak poorly of the host culture residents in their presence, TCKs can pick up the same disdain and thereby waste one of the richest parts of their heritage.
Decisiveness: The Importance of Now versus the Delusion of Choice
BENEFIT: THE IMPORTANCE OF NOW
Because their lifestyle is transitory, many TCKs have a sense of urgency that life is to be lived now. They may not stop to deliberate long on any particular decision because the chance to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro will be gone if new orders to move come through. Do it now. Seize the day! Sushi is on the menu at the shop around the corner today. Better try it while you can. Some may fault them for impulsiveness, but they do get a lot of living done while others are still deciding what they do or don’t want to do.
CHALLENGE: THE DELUSION OF CHOICE
For the same reason that some TCKs seize every opportunity, other TCKs seem, ironically, to have difficulty in making or feeling excited about plans at all. So often in the past their desires and intentions to do such things as act in a school play, run for class office, or be captain of the soccer team were denied when Dad or Mom came home one day and said, “Well, I just received orders today; we are shipping out to Portsmouth in two weeks.” No matter how much the TCKs thought they could choose what they wanted to do at school or in the neighborhood, it turned out that they had no choice at all. They weren’t going to be there for the next school year or soccer season after all. Off they went, their dreams vanishing. In Portsmouth, or wherever their next post was, the TCKs asked themselves, “Why even make plans for what I want to do? I’ll just have to leave again.”
These preempted plans can lead to what some mental health professionals call a “delusion of choice.” In other words, a choice to act is offered (“Would you like to run for class president next year?”), but circumstances or the intervention of others arbitrarily eliminates that choice (“Pack your bags; we’re leaving tomorrow.”). Reality for many TCKs is feeling choiceless. The achievement of a goal, the development of a relationship, or the completion of a project can be cut short by an unexpected event or the decision of a personnel director.
For some TCKs, decision making has an almost superstitious dimension. “If I allow myself to make a decision and start taking the necessary steps to see it through, something will happen to stop what I want.” For others, this delusion of choice is wrapped in a theological dimension. “If God finds out what I really want, he’ll take it away from me.” Rather than be disappointed, they refuse to acknowledge to themselves, let alone to others or to God, what they would like to do.
Other TCKs and ATCKs have difficulty in making a choice that involves a significant time commitment because they know a new and more desirable possibility may always appear. Signing a contract to teach in Middleville might be a wise economic move, but what if a job opportunity opens in Surabaya next week? It’s hard to choose one thing before knowing all the choices. Experience has taught them that life not only offers multiple options, but these options can appear suddenly and must be acted on quickly or they will be gone. Yet the very fact that one choice might preclude another keeps them from making any choice at all.
Chronically waiting until the last minute to plan rather than risking disappointment or having to change plans can be particularly frustrating for spouses or children waiting for decisions to be made that will affect the entire family. Adult TCKs also may miss significant school, job, or career opportunities. It becomes such a habit to wait that they never follow through on leads or fill out necessary forms by the deadline.
One of the most disabling outcomes of this delusion of choice is that it can lead some TCKs and ATCKs to take on a victim mentality. They may fuss or complain bitterly about their circumstances, but seem unable to make the choices necessary to extricate themselves from the situation or change things even when they could. No matter what others may suggest to ameliorate the circumstances, the ATCKs always have a reason that person’s suggestion won’t work. Perhaps this is another way of avoiding one more disappointment in life. “If you don’t hope, then you can’t be disappointed.” It may also be that with choice comes respo
nsibility, with the internal message “If you don’t try, you can’t fail.” It’s simply safer not to try than to risk disappointment or failure. For whatever reason, this place of being seemingly unable to make even the simplest choice to begin to change unwanted circumstances is a sad reality for some ATCKs we have met.
Relation to Authority: Appreciative versus Mistrustful
BENEFIT: APPRECIATIVE OF AUTHORITY
For some TCKs, living within the friendly confines of a strong organizational system is a positive experience in their lives. Relationships with adults in their community are basically constructive and nurturing. There may be almost a cocoon atmosphere on their military base, or embassy, business, or mission compound. The sense of structure under such strong leadership gives a feeling of great security. This world is safe. The struggles of others in the world can be shut out at least for some time and perks such as generators, special stores, and paid vacations are all part of a wonderful package deal. As adults, they look back on their TCK childhood and those who supervised their lives with nothing but great fondness.
CHALLENGE: MISTRUSTFUL OF AUTHORITY
Other ATCKs and TCKs feel quite differently. For all the reasons (and maybe more) mentioned under “The Delusion of Choice,” they begin to mistrust the authority figures in their lives, easily blaming virtually all of their problems in life on parents or organizational administrators who made autocratic decisions about where and when they would move with little regard for their needs or the needs of their family. One of them told us,
My parents finally got divorced when Mom said she wouldn’t make one more move. The company had moved my Dad to a new position every two years. Each time we went to a different place, even different countries—sometimes in the middle of the school year, sometimes not. My mom could see how it was affecting us children as well as herself. We would finally start to find our own places within the new group when it was time to move again. Mom asked Dad to talk to the managers of his company and request they leave us in one place while we went through high school at least. They said they couldn’t do it as they were amalgamating their headquarters and the office in our town was being phased out. Dad didn’t want to find a new job, and mom wouldn’t move, so they got divorced. I’ve always been angry about both my Dad’s decision and the company’s.
In the end, some TCKs who have had their life unhappily affected because of decisions made by others tell us they will starve before risking the possibility that the direction of their lives will be so profoundly affected once more by the decision of someone in authority over them.
Arrogance: Real versus Perceived
At times, the very richness of their background creates a new problem for TCKs. Once, after a seminar, a woman came up to Dave Pollock and said, “There’s one issue you failed to talk about tonight and it’s the very thing that almost ruined my life. It was my arrogance.”
Unfortunately, arrogance isn’t an uncommon word when people describe TCKs or ATCKs. It seems the very awareness that helps TCKs view a situation from multiple perspectives can also make TCKs impatient or arrogant with others who only see things from their own perspective—particularly people from their home culture. This may happen for several reasons.
1. A cross-cultural lifestyle is so normal to them that TCKs themselves don’t always understand how much it has shaped their view of the world.They easily forget it’s their life experiences that have been different from others’, not their brain cells, and do consider themselves much more cosmopolitan and just plain smarter, or at least more globally aware, than others.
2. This impatience or judgmentalism can sometimes serve as a point of identity with other TCKs.It becomes one of the markers of “us” versus “them.” It’s often easy for a get-together of TCKs to quickly degenerate into bashing the stupidity of non-TCKs. The irony is that the TCKs are then doing unto others what they don’t like having done unto themselves—equating ignorance with stupidity.
Sometimes TCKs and ATCKs appear arrogant because they have chosen a permanent identity as being “different” from others.
Todd, an ATCK, was angry. His parents could do no right. His sponsoring organization had stupid policies, and his American peers ranked among the dumbest souls who had ever been born. Todd castigated everyone and everything. Mark, his good friend, finally got tired of the tirades and pointed out the pride and arrogance coming out in his words.
“You know, todd,” Mark said, “it’s your experiences that have been different—not your humanity. I think if you try, you might discover you are not as different from the rest of the world as you seem to feel. You know, you’re a normal person.”
At that, todd fairly jumped out of his chair. “the last thing I want to be is ‘normal.’ that idea is nauseating to me.”
This “I’m different from you” type of identity is often a defense mechanism to protect against unconscious feelings of insecurity or inferiority. It is another expression of the “screamer” we have discussed. But a “different from” identity has a certain arrogance attached to it. TCKs often use it to put other people down as a way to set themselves apart or boost their sense of self-worth. “I don’t care if you don’t accept me, because you could never understand me anyway.” TCKs chalk up any rejection they feel or interpersonal problems they have to being different, rather than taking a look to see if they themselves might have added to this particular problem.
At other times, however, what is labeled as arrogance in TCKs is simply an attempt to share their normal life experiences. People who don’t understand their background may feel the TCKs are bragging or name dropping when they speak of places they have been or people they have met. Non-TCK friends don’t realize TCKs have no other stories to tell.
And sometimes there may be a mix of both real and perceived arrogance. The conviction or passion with which TCKs speak because of what they have seen and/or experienced makes them seem dogmatic and overly sure of their opinions. Is that arrogance? It’s hard to know.
Lessons from the TCK Petri Dish
CCKs of all backgrounds tell us how they have learned to play the appropriate role for whichever cultural community they are in, often changing roles as needed. They also know what it means for others to make false assumptions about who they are when they are defined by their appearance or traditional models of “diversity,” which miss the hidden diversity created by their life experiences. We look next at the benefits that McCaig also referred to that can develop into true life skills.
CHAPTER 8
Practical Skills
One day I poured out my bitter complaints to a senior missionary. I could not understand why the mission imported thirty canadian and U.S. Young people to do famine work, when not one of the more than fifteen resident MKs [missionary kids]—experienced in language and culture—had been asked to help. He told me to quit complaining and sign on. I did.1
—Andrew Atkins
THE FEELINGS ANDREW EXPRESSES REFLECT the fact that growing up as a TCK not only increases an inner awareness of our culturally diverse world, but the experience also helps in the development of useful personal skills for interacting with and in it. Some of these characteristics are acquired so naturally they aren’t recognized, acknowledged, or effectively used—either by ATCKs or others—as the special gifts they are. At the same time, some of the skills also have a flip side, where a skill becomes a liability, as we will see in the discussion of social and linguistic skills in this chapter.
Cross-Cultural Skills
As TCKS have the opportunity not only to observe a great variety of cultural practices but also to learn what some of the underlying assumptions are behind them, they often develop strong cross-cultural skills. More significant than the ease with which they can change from chopsticks to forks for eating, or from bowing to shaking hands while greeting, is their ability to be sensitive to the more hidden aspects or deeper levels of culture and to work successfully in these areas. For ATCKs who go into international or i
ntercultural careers, this ability to be a bridge between different groups of people can be useful in helping their company or organization speak with a more human voice in the local community and be more sensitive to the dynamics of potentially stressful situations in the international work environment.
Nancy Ackley Ruth, an ATCK who is a highly sought cross-cultural trainer, conducts seminars called “The Added Value of TCKs in the Workplace.” in these seminars, she tells of a situation where a corporation wanted to branch out and begin doing business internationally. The CEO in the United States set up a conference call with potential new partners in the middle east. When the potential partners did not join the call at the appointed time, he became frustrated. Next, his impatience could barely be contained when they at last joined the call but began what he termed “chitchat”—each one asking about the other’s family, the weather, and so on. Finally, the CEO could take it no longer and interrupted the conversation to remind them that there was only a half hour left to do their business.
The voices on the other end of the call became strangely quiet as the CEO tried to proceed. A junior partner, tom, sitting beside the CEO passed him a note that read, “You may not realize it but you were doing business. In that part of the world, relationships must be established before business deals can be done.”
Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds Page 15