By Timothy Brantingham
My kids have no idea they are Third Culture Kids, nor have any interest in discussing the topic. In fact, they become a bit incredulous if you say they may not know all that much about being American. They confidently shout out they are from “Hawaii”, and will root loudly for any USA team on TV… unless they are playing Japan or Hong Kong, in which case a hint of internal struggle might become visible on the brows. They, of course, have no idea of the weirdness of their positions because they go to school with kids who are Australian and French in the same way. To them that national identity is just a sticker you paste on the “Where Are We From?” poster at the front of the classroom. I come from that surfing place; I come from that place with a big tower. Kangaroos!
I was the same when in school in Taiwan in the 1980s. My life’s ambition was to be an all-American boy, wearing my jean jacket, hoping to one day suck down chili dogs at the Tastee-Freez with a girl named Diane. I even dressed the part with the penny loafers and the tapered rolled up jeans. We’d talk about the Indiana-Ohio State game after school, except instead of chili dogs we were eating jiaozis and fried rice at the corner noodle stand. On Saturdays we’d go a KTV (a place to sing karaoke or watch movies in a private room with friends) and watch hours of American MTV videos on VHS, diligently recorded and sent kindly by someone’s aunt back home. Bubble milk tea with some dried squid strips often accompanied the viewing. Don’t ask me who the top Taiwanese movie star was in 1987, or which Taiwanese music act was the most popular. We were not paying attention to Taiwan; we were looking only to the US, and I couldn’t wait to get there.
Then I got there. (Menacing music playing loudly and violently now.)
I’ll spare you the gory details, I’ll just say it was not pretty. Not that there was anything wrong with the US; I just did not fit there. I looked the part but did not really know how to play it. My stories were all Asian context stories, and after several weeks of telling them, I realized my dorm mates were not that interested in hearing them; or better put, were not able to relate. I came across as exotic, maybe a little elitist; I felt awkward. I found it safer to keep to myself. The US was not as shiny and wonderful as I had imagined, and the real blow came when I discovered that the chili dogs at Tastee-Freez were, in fact, quite unappetizing to eat. And then when Diane asked me if Taiwan was a suburb of Chicago, I packed up my ill-fitting American dream for good.
That’s when TCK consciousness kicked in for me: in a longing for the sights, smells, tastes, and contours of Taiwan: a home that I had under-loved all my school years, but which had actually nurtured and fed me: my wet nurse. That’s when I started looking for ways to get back; when I started seeking people out who could understand that experience. In other words, a third culture consciousness started forming for me directly out of my sense of grief and loss; out of a desire to find some new place to plug in to, to belong to.
I did make it back to Taiwan, and of course it was not as I had remembered it. I went far more local on round two, started to look more East than West, but that didn’t fill the gap either. My Taiwanese friends (and later friends in Shanghai) had as much difficulty relating to my weird TCK experience as my US friends. It seemed neither side offered a hook to tether to.
I went through a good fifteen years of deep funk, bouncing around the US, China and Taiwan, until finally finding the right combination of factors in Hong Kong that allowed me to settle down, one of them being a TCK wife.
I spent 17 of my first 18 years in Taiwan before moving to the US; I suppose culture shock was inevitable. But friends who only had a year or two in Taiwan had similar experiences. They may have had more home culture in them; they may have had intact and familiar communities to return to, but that intense experience overseas, where one’s cultural bedrock is levered up even a little bit, means new exotically scented air flowing through, which changes the way you experience home. Length of time overseas may make the homecoming experience more extreme; but transitions are transitions.
TCK literature is unanimous is saying the greatest challenge facing TCKs is the ever-increasing store of grief that accumulates after a life of many transitions and goodbyes. As Ruth Van Reken, a founding TCK researcher, writes, “The issue is that transition always involves loss, no matter how good the next phase will be. Loss always engenders grief and the greater you have loved a situation or place or people, the greater the grief.”
TCKs, who experience transition on a yearly basis, either from moving themselves or seeing others move, already have a heavier than normal share of slow-drip, unacknowledged grief. But the so-called return home can be where all that grief really comes gushing out. This “home” is the place you have been looking to for many years; it is where you were supposed to belong to; it was pasted on your class poster for 12 years. But now you have arrived home and—wow—it just doesn’t fit at all.
I remember being in college and my sister coming to visit; it was so wonderful to re-connect to someone who really understood me. When she left and I said goodbye to her at the Richmond airport, I suddenly could not control my emotions. I went outside, hid behind an oak tree, and cried uncontrollably for about 90 minutes. She hadn’t died. She just reminded me of what good connections felt like, and that little goodbye was one goodbye too many. I can’t tell you how common this experience is for TCK kids: at some point the grief just can’t be stored any more.
Here is what I will tell my kids when that returning home day comes:
- Recognize your loss. Have a memorial service for the place and people you are leaving. Facebook is nice, but not the same as being with them face to face. You will grieve the loss of their physical presence.
- Accept the grief, give yourself permission to express it; force yourself to express it. Cry (hopefully not behind a tree.)
- Don’t be unfair to those who cannot relate to you; your experience was weird; find other areas/ways to connect. Don’t shut them out. Be gracious. Don’t withdrawl.
- Don’t obsess with “getting back to…”; you can’t; it won’t be waiting for you. Embrace your new experiences and start building your new culture.
- Start finding new third culture comrades ASAP. And today there are many, and they are easier to find than ever.
International schools do a better job of preparing kids for “going home” than in my day, and the communities to which TCKs return are far more international than before. But still, transitions lead to loss; loss leads to grief; grief has to go somewhere.
Better to get the leaves and sticks cleaned out of those grief gutters now, so they are ready for the rains when they come.
Here are some helpful resources.
David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken
Christopher O’Shaughnessy
6 Tips for TCKs Returning Home