Culture in the Blender

…on your first job out of school, you see a presentation of ISO 9000 standards and are surprised to see that they changed eight years ago and you didn’t know. (Because you remember when your sponsoring company went through ISO certification when you were a teenager.)

Now that I’m driving to work for the first time in my life, I’ve spent a fair bit of time while I’m driving pondering the following: If you probably won’t be pulled over for speeding ~10 km/h in Sweden, is it true that American cops will overlook 10 mph of speeding? 10 mph is larger than 10 km/h. Does it matter? Or is the psychological magic of the number 10 more important?

I haven’t posted in a long time. My husband asked me about it a while back, and my answer was that nothing much had happened in my life that related to being a third culture kid. Adult third culture kid now, I suppose. Anyway, he pointed out that we had gone through the process of applying for a green card for me, and that related. I guess that’s true. But it still didn’t spur me to write. I decided to not say anything if I didn’t really have anything to say about being a third culture kid. Maybe it’s because it’s just another set of papers that will also be inadequate for describing my identity. It’s nice, in that I now have a formal paper tie to my favorite home country. But they’re still just papers.

On the other hand, I watched the Baader Meinhof Complex and Grand Ècole today. Watching stories in European settings made me keenly aware of how I experience distant proximities – things that are physically distant but feel emotionally close – because I’m a third culture kid. I recognize the leftist rhetoric of the RAF from Sweden. I knew kids in school whose parents were in some radical leftist organization that was spied on by the secret police. I recognize the styles of conversation, the landscapes, the apartment highrises. They look like the one my parents are sleeping in as I type. And I realized that my husband can watch such movies but not see the same thing I see, because it’s both emotionally and physically distant to him.

I also met a man from Mexico at a barbecue last week. I could see we were very similar – insiders and outsiders at the same time. I recognized the looks he got from the others for telling funny stories about Brazil, Portugese, and his Spanish. (Which were similar to some of my Swedish-Norwegian stories.) But I also recognized the ease with which he sat down in a patio full of white Americans. He was not a stranger, he belonged – if only more visibly partially than I, who am white and sound like and American when I speak. I knew he knew when we both said the same thing about disliking communism because we knew so much about it at the same time. And I was right – he married an American too.

My husband thought it was strange that I thought we had had shared experiences. I think it is strange that he cannot see. But this – this is more than just paperwork. These experiences and differences in how I and locals in my life see things, these are the things I wanted to blog about. So here’s a new post, for once in a long time.

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?