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By globalistgirl, on September 5th, 2007

The TCK page on Wikipedia

I contributed to the TCK page on Wikipedia a while ago, and after posting my previous post I skimmed through it (Alright, I admit it, I’m procrastrinating) and noticed the following header: “Non-United States TCKs”. It was followed by the phrase “Most international TCKs are expected..”

Uh, what? Excuse me? Are even American TCKs so stuck on nationalism that they classify the world into American and non-American? The whole point is that TCKs do NOT HAVE A HOME. If they do not have a home, how can they be either American OR non-American? Being a TCK is the way out of ‘needing’ to have a home country. A TCK from somewhere makes no sense. Why consider yourself a TCK if you think you have a home country? One of the prime characteristics of a TCK is the insider/outsider duality. If you’re from somewhere you’re an insider; if you’re not, then you’re an outsider. Even positing such a duality questions the existence of a neat two-category system, which is the POINT. Nation-states are political entities and logically have nothing whatsoever to do with ‘being from’ somewhere, other than as a probability argument. Citizenships and passports are a paper game we play, and ‘Here is something from my culture’ is another game we play, with one nation-state after the other. None of it is fundamental and none of it had to be that way; it could have been completely different and yet I’d be findamentally the same. I could have grown up eating salmon sashimi and upon my first encounter with Nordic smoked salmon realize this is almost like salmon sashimi, or realizing that when buying linen you can think about what makes good bamboo.

For someone like me who looks at the flag of her country of citizenship, her mother’s birth country and her current host country with equal (lack) of emotional engagement – they are special to me because I recognize them very well, but they do not represent me – the concept of ‘international TCK’ is just redundant. And irritating. It’s like saying that a TCK is supposed to have a home after all, that all this “international stuff” is just a phase or some neat tricks or like an extended vacation and all the scholarly research that’s been done on the subject isn’t really like that either. I feel so misunderstood all of a sudden.

33 comments to The TCK page on Wikipedia

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