Culture in the Blender

I’m homesick for China. I think anywhere in Asia would do.  Yesterday morning was rainy with a hint of fog, and I thought for a second that it was smog. I’m listening to Chinese music and wondering what’s in fashion. I want my morning bus to be one of the old Beijing buses with the wood floors, preferably number 403. I want there to be more people, more bustle. I had enough frequent flier miles to go, but I’ve used some to go see my boyfriend. And I can’t afford much after arriving anyway.

I’m supposed to be writing my doctoral thesis (hence very few posts lately), but for some reason I can’t stop thinking about where I’m going to live after I defend. I will be done with my education and so for the first time in my life have some kind of decision about where to live to make. I will be moving back in with my boyfriend, who already graduated and left, at first, but neither of us want to stay where he has a job now. But then what? I have few anxieties about spending the rest of my life with one person, but spending it in one place is giving me seriously cold feet. He wants to buy a house.

I’ve seen what property does to you - it binds you to a place. I don’t want to be tied down! What if I change my mind? What if he changes his mind? What if our children are miserable there? What if the ideal place for us to live is somewhere on another continent and we don’t know that because we haven’t been there yet, and we’re about to make a huge mistake? Images and feelings from my failed repatriation flash in front of my eyes. Just like some people want to be with several people at the same time because they can’t choose, I want to live in a few places at once just to hedge my bets. Ideally, I’d like to have a few different kinds of streets leading up to my house, one from China, one with a European city, and I’d like to work at an American company. All of a sudden I want to make getting a job with a lot of travel my #1 priority. Can I really commit to a single place in a single country for the rest of my life?

Part of my efforts to graduate involves finding a job. People ask from time to time where I’d like to live, and I say “New York.”

There seem to be two general responses to this: Americans often say “New York is too expensive/busy/crowded” and non-American often say “Oh, I’d love to live in New York too!” I wonder why that is.

My experience of attending school in Sweden was that the Social Democrats have a serious case of delusional thinking regarding what to reward and communicating that you have to work hard to get what you want in life. Conservative Swedes tend to agree, as far as I can see, but I was somewhat surprised to see the opinion scathingly and directly expressed in Expressen, one of the two (generally Social Democrat-leaning) evening papers in Sweden.

Sometimes, perspectives that you may have because of another culture are held by people that never left that culture as well. I always find that somewhat reassuring. It shows that even though you may have arrived at the opinion or idea using different cultural pathways (as opposed to logical arguments) you can still end up in the same place (usually a logical argument) sometimes. Maybe even a place of partial belonging?

The trial of Shell regarding the execution of Ogoni human rights and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa has started. Shell is accused of pressuring the military government of Nigeria into violently suppressing peaceful protest by the Ogoni, who live in the Nigerian oilfields (or perhaps one should say on the land that Shell made into an oilfield) but see none of the profits but all of the environmental destruction. Shell, of course, is denying all charges. Ken Saro-Wiwa led the peaceful organizing and protest, and was executed together with eight associates after a trial described as a “travesty of justice” by John Major.

Saro-Wiwa explained the matter succintly on US radio shortly before his arrest:

“Shell does not want to negotiate with the Ogoni people. Each time they’ve come under pressure from local people, their want has always been to run to the Nigerian government and to say to the Nigerian government, ‘Oil is 90 percent of your foreign exchange earning. If anything happens to oil, your economy will be destroyed. Therefore, you must go and deal with these people, these troublemakers.’ And most times, the government will oblige them and visits local communities of poor, dispossessed people with a lot of violence.
And when these communities then protested and said, ‘Look. Look at the amount of violence that is being used against us, even though we are only protesting peacefully,’ then the oil companies will come and say, ‘Well, there is no way we can determine how much violence a government decides to use against its own people.’ So, basically, the local communities have no leverage with the oil companies at all.”

This post will not be what one usually reads regarding multinational corporations (MNCs) and globalization and general evilness.  Don’t get me wrong - what Shell has done is absolutely terrible. But having your life caught up with one and becoming a TCK because of one makes it difficult to just say that MNCs are evil and should behave. Some nuance and better understanding of why some MNCs misbehave is needed.

I am an affirmative global. I believe that globalization is ultimately more for good than for bad. I believe this for both personal and logical reasons. The personal reasons are what makes me wonder how some MNCs end up doing such horrid things and others don’t. My sponsoring organization has scandals in its past, but the biggest one involved the CEO writing himself a spectacular severance package that the board didn’t really approve, not human rights abuses. In terms of people getting hurt, there is only an asbestos lawsuit inherited from an American company they bought. Also, “my” MNC is bringing with it worker safety standards along with concern for quality from Switzerland and Sweden to China along with the foreign managers, because that’s what the managers know and value. (I know, because I had a summer job translating work procedures into English once.) They pay well. They give opportunities for foreign travel. So why isn’t “my” MNC making power technology in sweatshops?

Perhaps part of the answer is to be found implicit in the question. “My” MNC makes technology products - well-understood and mature technology, but technology nonetheless - which requires educated and skilled labor. I learned that transformer winding is an art that takes years to master on the floor as a teen. It’s “just” winding special paper around flat copper wire, yet it takes years to get good at it. And it’s not something you can get an education for - you have to learn by doing. The projects are designed by electrical engineers. One does not put electrical engineers in a sweatshop and expect them to just crunch out more work, no matter where in the world they are located. One does not fire a winder who won’t work 12 hours a day and hire a new one off the street. And due to the high shipping costs of large power technology products, it’s more cost-effective to build it as locally as possible if there’s a larger market - and hiring locals, rather than sending in a very expensive team of expats, is clearly the better move. So perhaps a key predictor of MNC misbehavior is whether unskilled labor can be used to make their product.

However, there is another factor. Nigeria’s military dictatorship is surely a factor in Saro-Wiwa’s death. With no pretense of caring for the people, a dictatorship enables many bad things, including doing anything the company that supplies 90% of the country’s income by exploitation of natural resources wants. This usually also includes taking as much of the money as possible. Even in countries with “merely” weak governments, exploitation of natural resources of nearly any kind can be accompanied with severe pollution, destruction, and labor abuse. (Diamonds, gold, other metals.) Processing can also be similar, such as in metal smelters in the former USSR. Ultimately, someone important is looking the other way in the countries in which these things happen, and that someone (or more likely someones) just doesn’t think other people’s suffering and pollution of their country is as important as getting rich and/or staying in power.

Those of us in democratic countries with laws against all of these abuses that can be and are enforced can only really use consumer power (and some limited legislation of the type that companies doing business in “our” country must follow environmental and labor regulations elsewhere as well) to try to influence the misbehaving MNCs. The lack of regard of leaders for their citizens is something that the citizens of those countries must fix or ask for help with - much like Saro-Wiwa tried to do. I’m not saying that this is simple or straightforward by any means, nor do I pretend to know how to do it. I just know that one country trying to “fix” another has never really worked and has all kinds of problematic overtones. (Including this silly war in Iraq - I made the argument before the invasion that even if Bush was right, it would still be a bad idea. I hate to be right on both counts.) Even if Shell is acquitted - and I really hope they’re not - Ken Saro-Wiwa was right when he spoke at the end of his mock trial:

“I repeat that we all stand before history. I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial and it is as well that it is represented by counsel said to be holding a watching brief. The Company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come and the lessons learnt here may prove useful to it for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the Company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the Company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.

On trial also is the Nigerian nation, its present rulers and those who assist them. Any nation which can do to the weak and disadvantaged what the Nigerian nation has done to the Ogoni, loses a claim to independence and to freedom from outside influence.”

The trial is being held in New York.

Ruth van Reken has written a post about Obama’s TCK-laden staff - check it out! Thanks to Ranterraver for the link.

My boyfriend and I are organizing our finances and decided to use Quicken. I was attracted to the idea of having all my accounts and investments in all countries I have them in displayed in one place. Quicken can show investment accounts and even pull the current performance from the Internet… in theory. It insists that I must have accounts with an American brokerage firm, and keeps trying to get me to get the information automatically from H&R Block. I tried typing in ‘Handelsbanken’ as the broker, but of course it wasn’t listed and it won’t let me pick an option like “Other”, so now I’m stuck with H&R Block. Moving on. After some initial difficulty, I found the stock tickers for my mutual funds. (I don’t know what a ticker is in Swedish, which didn’t help since they’re listed on the Stockholm exchange.) After feeding them in, Quicken has no idea of what to do with them apparently because it can’t find them. Apparently nothing is listed outside the US. The drop-down list of types of mutual funds has a number of categorizations like small-cap and large-cap, and then one blanket called “International.” I imagine that the day I talk to a financial advisor here in the US, they will freak at my apparent lack of diversification. All my investments are “international.” Quicken doesn’t care that one is small-cap, one is large-cap, and two are emerging markets. One tracks the EuroStoxx 500! They’re all just “international”. Talk about a useless category. I know in the grand scheme of things, having your identity and investment strategy marginalized by a piece of software isn’t exactly the height of human suffering, but it shows how ingrained national perspectives are and how they are prescriptive. Surely, the makers of Quicken know about this thing called “economic globalization.” They just don’t seem to translate that to the people level of their users - and why would they? Who knows what’s going on out there, right? If you’re not 100% local you’re a problem case, and it’s your problem.

A week ago, I flew to see my boyfriend and had to connect through O’Hare. Even without a snowstorm, there were weather delays - due to lightning this time. I brought along Ruth Van Reken’s book Letters Never Sent to read. While I can’t say that I recognized my own experience other than very occasionally, it did teach me something about the differences between different kinds of third culture kids. Assuming her book is representative of the missionary kid experience (which I have no qualifications to judge myself), missionary kids have an overwhelming sense of obligation to their deity. A lot of their experience is shaped by feeling guilty about their feelings of pain due to being a TCK, because they think they are defying God’s will by feeling that way. (If any MKs have comments on this, feel free to correct me.) I don’t recognize that at all. My upbringing has perhaps been globally speaking unusually secular, but I think a large part of the disconnect is due to that my reason for being yanked around was economic globalization. Religion was, in my world, a private matter. Something unrelated to everything TCK-related. I tried seeking solace in religion, only to find that I failed to believe in a deity no matter how comforting it might have been.

What does seem similar is the feeling that one’s life is subordinate to larger machinations of life. Where God’s will is the reason for missionary kids becoming TCKs, for us business brats it’s economic globalization. If business is good in China, someone has to go to China to ensure the subsidiary is run in the way expected by the parent. If the American subsidiary is losing money, someone’s got to go fix it. They evidently can’t take care of it themselves. If someone with specific technical skills is needed in Timbuktu, you find someone somewhere that has them and send them to Timbuktu. Ruth became a missionary herself. I am striving to become an international businesswoman. We go back to what we know. I do not see God’s hand guiding things. I see capitalism and the professional classes guiding things. The young Ruth separated people into Christians and non-Christians. The young me separated people into professionals and working-class people. (A tendency not helped by living in a country where class consciousness is politically very important.) Ruth sees God as the alpha and omega of our world. I see free trade and economic globalization as the alpha and omega of our global economy and thus world. God wants your parents to be missionaries. Your parents are needed somewhere else to take advantage of a market opportunity. Either way, your needs, wants and desires are irrelevant to the powers that be.

At O’Hare, my flight was delayed two hours and I went to a bar to spend some time. As a TCK I know how to make superficial friends quickly, and was soon seated with three other semi-stranded people talking. What felt like all of a sudden, the white guy drunk enough to buy us all rounds of drinks was chatting with the prison convict about being ’88’ and doing a sieg heil. The prison convict, who was Latino and spoke Spanish, shared a video on his mobile of Obama morphing into a monkey. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. The only other person I’ve seen do a sieg heil was the budding neonazi in 8th grade. He did a sieg heil in public. This American did a sieg heil in public. And he expected not only me and the other white guy at the table, but the Latino to empathise! I really hope this guy is as freakish as he seems to me. I really do. I half expected him to pull out a knife and threaten people. I’m writing this on the plane (to be posted later, of course) and I still can’t believe that he did a sieg heil in public. He was hitting on me, despite the fact that the second thing I told him was that I was flying to see my boyfriend, and as soon as he did the sieg heil it went from pathetic to disgusting. He planted a kiss on my head when he was leaving, and I wish he had never touched me. And I’m disgusted with myself for not saying so to his face.

Yesterday, I went very reluctantly to the Anti-Prop 8 rally in California where I live.  I went with the attitude that “since no-one supports my right to hook up ever with anyone, and since I strongly oppose any kind of marriage at all, what am I doing here!”  A very extreme generalization but indeed one that has seemed to always persistently manifest on the surface.  I have always felt an undercurrent of social stigma in the air as an unmarried, long celibate heterosexual man.  It is often non-verbal, but I have had these words occasionally hurled at me: “Stalker”, “Pervert”, “Weirdo” or “Loser”, or merely “You make women Uncomfortable”.  I have seen the attitude at school or on Facebook, among family and with friends.  The only quarter I have never got that vibe is from my umpteen married, committed, lesbian or related female friends and family.  In near total isolation, it is often hard to disregard the message the world is giving you and avoid believing in it. However, I really got into the spirit of the rally as we went along, and found some common ground, something so deeply lacking of recent.

As I stayed and “felt the love go around”, it became clear what I was doing there.  When I was at the rally, a girl from my law school spoke about the legal implications etc., both in a Federal and Californian context.  She was representing my Evidence professor there,  herself a very spunky and vivacious lady who had filed an amicus brief against Ken Starr (who himself had also taught Jurisprudence at my school).  However, most important were the words of one of the pastors at that reformist church, “The minority NEVER has to live apologetically at the acceptance and tolerance of the majority or mainstream”, which mirrored my thoughts.  I understood then that this was not about mere gender orientation and institutions under the law, but about the attitude of society in general to the concepts of relatedness, intimacy, equality and unity that have been the pervasive common thread, be it in the Code of Hammurabi, the Torah, Bible, Koran or Bhagavadgita, the Magna Carta, the Declaration des Droits des Hommes, the US, South African or Indian constitutions among others, the Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the UN Charter, or several EU declarations.  The only difference is since we as TCKs have not yet given ourselves recognition, let alone been able to expect it from the world’s great institutions.  It may come too late for some, but come it will, and many of us will be able to benefit and flourish, as no doubt many of us already have in the face of the adversity.  I could see that the discussion was taking on currents that our discussion may take on in 5, 10 or 20 years.  But it was more apparent to me than ever that because of our different socialization and indeed sexualization, we are indeed a distinct variation on the species, one that needs an identity and desperately requires protection from the whims, laws, bureaucracy, mores, social contract and judgments of the “mainstream”.

I told the pastor at that church that I would be back to introduce the TCK concept and issues to her.  I also was able to explain the issue to some other friends that had no idea at all, some of whom even met the definition of TCKs.

“In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.” - Pastor Martin Niemöller

Well, not exactly, it’s just that the Swiss and Americans called him a German, the Germans called him a Jew, and the French (in their usual style) favorably styled him a “Citoyen du Monde”.  Not to mention that he is accused of stealing his Serbian ex-wife’s research.  And actually worked for the Swiss Patent Office (this TCK also works in Patents when there is work available).