I-85, driven by thousands of people every day, has now become a piece of knowledge and experience that only my family shares, in the frame of reference of my parents. It goes through where I live and if I take it east, I will get to the city they lived in before they had to leave. No one around them has ever heard of I-85, or would know what it is if they heard “I-85″ in speech. Or know what it might look like.
They also don’t know that what it will feel like for my parents to come back for Christmas and get on I-85N, above all that it will be coming home. They will come home and then get on I-85 to drive up to Richmond again, where they hosted a wedding two months ago, to spend Christmas with family. That’s not something anyone around them now can relate to, but it’s important to my parents.
My parents just moved back to Sweden, after having been given a month’s notice that my father was no longer needed in the US. Other than the suddenness of the move - a confused Swedish HR manager is to have said “But don’t you own a house….?” when my father called - I am surprised by how much it is affecting me.
I am an adult TCK. I haven’t lived with my parents in years, and they’ve moved here and there since I moved out and it’s been mostly fun. So why does it feel so hard now, of all times? Shouldn’t it have felt harder to pack up two suitcases and fly off to college on another continent than the one my parents were on when I was 18? Or more inconvenient to be in touch when they were in China and I was in the US?
Perhaps it ’should’ have, but it wasn’t at all. Part of it may be that I am now giving up something without anything in return. When I was going to college, a new exciting part of my life was starting ‘in exchange’. But I think a bigger part of it is that I have now had time to grow some family roots here. Not just my own roots, but shared roots - old college friends, husband, in-laws - and parents in the same area. I had gotten used to being able to reach out with a phone call at any time I am awake to anyone else of importance in my life. I simply got used to my world being geographically proximate and cycled into a phase of my life where other identities than being a third culture kid were more salient to me.
My parents’ sudden move ripped a big part of that geographically proximate world out and away. All four of us - me and my husband, my mother and father - had implicitly imagined seeing each other from time to time for dinner, or a day or so, and if we decided to have children my parents would be able to drive a few hours to be there, and there would be general family support and advice and love. Not so anymore. There would be a delayed call or an email. Again.
Another part of why I am so sad is probably where they are moving to. I don’t like Sweden, and so am not excited about their new home. We’ve all already lived there, so it’s not new and exciting. No one is excited about the particular city they’re having to move to. The sense of new opportunity, knowledge, and experiences is completely missing. This isn’t an opportunity to expand life, it’s a recession.
I think I am catching a glimpse of why locals seem to think expatriation is this mind-bogglingly difficult and taxing thing to do. When you only focus on what you are losing, it seems hard indeed.
Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells in a wonderful story why only knowing one story of someone is nearly always one-dimensional and omits important information.
Although I think we’ve all heard “home is where the heart is” as some kind of well-meant, but misguided attempt to shed light on a lifetime of thought in a few seconds, I’m starting to appreciate a second possible meaning to the proverb, one that might actually be helpful. My rub with the idea is that our hearts are not attached to one place - so how does that help? And for those who feel at home somewhere where they will never be accepted as Self due to race or ethnicity, it’s downright a slap in the face. But when I think about spending the rest of my life with my fiance, I feel a sense of calm in part because we will make a home together wherever we will be. My heart is with him, and that’s just one place, so to speak. He said something along those lines a few times when I was down about not belonging anywhere earlier, and he was right. No sense of division or of being torn or wondering to whom my feelings can be expressed. No one questions commitment to a life partner. This feeling is one of the big factors that made me realize I really want to spend the rest of my life with him instead of someone else. Being with him is not entirely unlike being in the third culture - it’s a sense of home and comfort I can bring with me. (Not incidentally, he got adopted as a son-in-law after meeting my parents once. It’s that similar.) We can roll with the punches and be ourselves in many different ways as appropriate.
I had never in a million years expected to feel this way about someone who has never left their country of birth. I read sometime right after we had become a couple that children of alcoholics have similar problems as TCKs, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s why. His mother is an alcoholic and his father a drug user, and somehow he got through his childhood, went to college, and got a PhD. Why we should have similarities with children of alcoholics I don’t know. I’d try to find out if I wasn’t so very busy planning a wedding and writing my thesis. Perhaps a project for the future.
After some thinking at the beginning of the year, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my boyfriend and wanted to stand up and say so. In other words, I decided I wanted to marry him. I cooked up a proposal scheme (had to be flexible, since we live three states apart, and I decided to throw in a candy bribe for good measure), bought a ring in the Nordic tradition, and popped the question. And so now I’m engaged!
This is where the culture mess starts. I should have asked about ring metals. I bought a plain 18k yellow gold band without particularly thinking about it - because the only cultural tradition I know that has men wearing engagement rings also holds that an engagement ring is an 18k gold band. Turns out metal choices are more subject to fashion in the US, and what’s more, yellow gold looks old-fashioned to my fiance. So that was a failure.
Second, after his initial happiness wore off, he freaked out about the fact that I didn’t have an engagement ring. I told him that wasn’t important, but he insisted not only that we not tell anyone until he got me one, but that it be an American engagement ring. (Diamond ring rather than gold band.) I had no idea having a ring for me was so important. Turns out he was right in gauging the response, though - all of his family immediately asked to see the ring.
Now we’re planning a mostly American wedding. This is a home of mine, and getting married is very low-key (although it’s growing in popularity and hoopla) in Sweden. (The invites will likely look bizarre to my family.) However, I refuse to be given away by my father. That is the most ridiculous part of Anglo weddings, and I’m not playing along with that. It’s our third-culture wedding after all. My fiance fell in love with the carriage ride to the ceremony site that’s part of our wedding package, and so it looks like we’re walking up the aisle together in the Nordic tradition as well. Then we’re throwing an afternoon tea reception, which clearly will involve supervising the hotel quite a bit. Their initial menu suggestion included beef wellington and scallops with bacon.
I imagine all of the guests will be surprised at at least one element of the wedding, if not several. I also imagine there will be a lot of explaining required for everyone to feel like they know what’s going on and what it means. First, my parents are hosting the wedding in the American tradition, which will be normal to our American guests but strange to our Swedish guests. (Not sure how that might look to our Chinese guests.) Then there are the ceremony elements, which will likely be alternately familiar and unfamiliar to all guests. And then there’s how to behave at an afternoon tea, and a lack of a garter toss and a bouquet toss, that may surprise American guests. (The garter toss is just tacky, and I’m not throwing a bouquet to any single female guests that don’t have the right to get legally married.) The cake topper (for the American-style wedding cake) is a 囍 (shuāng xǐ, double happiness).
I’m sort of excited to have so many family members and friends share in my third culture wedding! It’ll be a mess - but it will be our mess. And for once, the majority gets to deal with adjusting to other people’s cultures, and my mixing is just fine. I’m very lucky to have found such a special and open-minded guy!
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.”
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