TCK: On Meeting New People

TCK (3CK), or third culture kid, is a person who grew up in different countries or societies than their native one and consequently, often has a skewed sense of belonging to any culture. That’s the Wikipedia definition of it anyway. I am a third culture kid. As our societies become more and more international, there will be more and more of people like me, and someone ought to know what life is like on our side so here I am, attempting to tell it all. Let me start by saying that it’s a wonderful  experience growing up in an international environment and I’m thankful for it . But as with everything, it brings its own, sometimes unexpected, difficulties too.

I am never more aware that I am a societal oddity than when I’m meeting new people. Having just moved to a new city (again), I’ve been going through this a lot recently. Indisputably, the question I dread most is the simple “Where are you from?”

There is an all-too-noticeable hesitation as I think of how to best answer this question. It’s not that I don’t have an answer. It’s that I have too many.  I usually start by naming one place for simplicity’s sake.  Then the conversation gets interesting depending on the person with whom I’m speaking. Some people will  take no notice or make only a silent assumption about the slightly awkward answer and carry on the conversation in another direction at which I’m slightly relieved. Others politely ask about the source of my hesitation or  they mention  something about that place to which I can’t respond the way they assumed I would. Then I’m forced to explain why that is and name the list of places that I call home to an awestruck or intimidated audience. Inevitably, the conversation takes a turn toward my travels instead of the acquainting period it was supposed to be. At this point I have either shared more than I necessarily care to with strangers or I sound like a spoiled attention-hogging show-off. Both, more often than not, unfortunately. Living an international lifestyle is interesting, let’s face it, but let’s also not forget that I’m also a person who is neither a rockstar nor a vagrant. I am what my life and everyone and everything in it shaped me to be and I wouldn’t want that to become a stumbling block in our acquaintance any more than you would want your background to be deterrent to me.

Then there are those people who are less fascinated by my history and are more concerned with why I can’t give a straight answer. “But which one do you consider ‘home’?” they ask. Now, that is a loaded question.  On the surface, all of them. Home is my native country that I, unlike many TCK’s, was fortunate enough to develop a real bond with, home is where my family lives, home is where I spent a significant amount of time especially with close friends, and ultimately home is where I rest my head at night. For me and many TCK’s, those are all different places.  But the question deals with more than that, with the most basic attributes of being a TCK. Our idea of home is fundamentally different than the norm because we can’t tie it to a geographical location. Our real homes are defined by the culture we lived in, which may or may not be the same as the culture of the country in which we reside.  For example, going to a French/International  school in the heart of Texas made me neither completely immersed in the French culture nor in the Texan culture. But the set of attitudes and values and practices that coloured by my day-to-day experiences, in other words my culture, was infused with  features assimilated from both cultures, which is why I’m very comfortable in both cultures but not fully embracing either one. This phenomenon is even more apparent when living in places like Dubai that are inherently international. Our culture becomes such a unique mix of the people around us and our own backgrounds that it’s almost impossible to replicate or find in a homogenous setting. That’s why many TCK’s are so much more at ease in an international setting even if they don’t ethnically relate to the people around them. The fact that the people around us are also on some level ill at ease is enough to make us relate to them.

The most amusing  of these conversations are when some blessed souls try to tell me how I should answer when I’m asked where I’m from. Unsurprisingly, they either judge by where I’ve lived the longest or what language I speak the best.  Thanks, but if it was that simple I would already have an answer ready. Trust me, I’m trying to reduce the awkward moments of my life, not increase them. However, because I have gained a good understanding of several cultures, I know what it entails to say “I’m so and so”, like what I’m expected to know or think about something or other because of that origin, without stereotyping.  Most of the time, I can’t relate enough to all the criteria of that place to allow myself to say that. If you were to ask me, I would say that I’m Egyptian and I only take slightly more pride in that than in being a cosmopolitan. Coincidentally, the people who are adamant about putting TCK’s in boxes are also the ones who are less likely to ask or try to understand how we view ourselves. That’s why I, the same person with the same history and the same behaviour, am considered by different people to be different things.  To some Egyptians I’m the “American girl”, to the American Copts I’m “the girl from Dubai”, for others that know me more I’m “The Egyptian”, and for those that know me least I’m “Texan.” God knows what they’ll say if I ever leave the Northwest. Yes, I’m all these and more, and I say that with no pride and no shame. But no single title is enough to encapsulate my experiences, or to describe my thoughts and opinions, or to give you any adequately reliable information about me. The same holds true for any TCK. We just don’t fit in neat little ethnicity check boxes.

Maybe we TCK’s over think this. Maybe nowadays we’re not so uncommon as before.  If we do overly agonize about the issue of “home” though , it’s  probably be because this disparity between our passports and our pasts is so acutely apparent to us while completely undetected by most others, sometimes including our own parents.

Anyway, next time you meet a TCK, remember: when we say we’re from “everywhere” we’re not being bratty or aloof, we just don’t know how else to explain ourselves. And please, for all our sakes, stop telling us where we’re from :).

More TCK-life-related posts to come,

KRP