Culture in the Blender

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.