A Third Culture

I've been spending more than few hours at the Library of Congress, thumbing through loads of books as I've researched about expats.  One book I discovered, The Writer and the Overseas Childhood: The Third CultureLiterature of Kingsolver, McEwan and Others (yeah, I know it's a long title) delved into a world I hadn't yet grasped, of the "Third Culture Kid" (TCK).

Third Culture Kids are people who have grown up overseas, whether as children of diplomats, missionaries, military families, etc.    Why three cultures?  The first culture is where you were born, the second is where you find yourself living, and the third is the independent community of the expatriate, with its own little cliques and mores.

As the years have passed, the numbers of TCK's have only multiplied, even if their stories are hidden to a large extent from the public, and yet a simple google search discovered a trailer for a potential feature film (see below), an organization devoted to Third Culture Kids, and the obligatory "31 Signs You're A Third Culture Kid."

Third culture kids ... ah, so lucky to be traveling about the world ... and yet the book often painted a bleak picture of a host of TCK troubles, among them "unresolved grief over losses of people and places, and difficulties in identity formation." In books written by TCK's (the list of these authors includes such luminaries as Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, and Pat Conroy), the author found the following themes:

Dislocation

Loss

Disenfranchisement

Guilt/Secretiveness

Some pretty heavy stuff ... and also hugely catalytic in the thoughts it produced about my own life (10 years in Thailand and counting).

Now, I know that I cannot claim to be a Third Culture Kid.  I am too well grounded in the United States (having spent the first 25 plus years, and many recent periods, of my life there) and I have found comfort (as well as discomfort) both in and outside my birthplace.  My identity was well formed, I think, before I ventured far overseas.

And yet ... I have also felt, and wrestled, with each of the aforementioned emotions.

Even today, as I tried to secure a spousal visa for Thailand, I felt a great sense of dislocation, as the Thai consul official sought proof of a return plane ticket to the United States.

"You're coming back here, right?" he said.

The short answer is "of course," (I don't ever expect to disappear from the United States forever) but the more intricate answers to "when" and "how long" defy easy answers in my current jobless state, living in an intercultural marriage, where at least one of us is always committed to live outside of their birthplace.  It is the very nature of our union.

A few months ago, a former student of mine in Thailand asked me (via Facebook chat) the classic question "when will you ever settle down?" and I had to think about what to type.  The question, in some ways, has ceased to make sense to me.

I wonder if the concept of "settling down" should be divorced from a physical aspect.  I look about and witness a world that moves at the pace that it does, and that often forces people to search far and wide for opportunity and connection.  Think of the number of jobs that the average person nowadays has over a lifetime, and even the number of places most people reside over the course of their existence.  I was born in New England, and always count that as a great honing beacon of place in my life, but over the course of my first two decades on this earth, up to the end of college, I lived in four different houses in three different states.

Ideas change as the world changes.  Is any home really permanent, when it all can be taken away in an instant with financial ruin or catastrophe?  Are we are all now virtually settled on the electronic landscapes of Facebook and Twitter?   Or perhaps we should instead wonder at our ability to be "settled" in our emotional and spiritual context.

If we feel secure with who we are, and what we're trying to do, and who we're trying to be, isn't that the greatest sense of home, the greatest anchor, that we can have, a kind of bulwark amidst the buffering winds and shifting tides of our existence?

I'll keep looking for answers ... in all my cultures ...