Culture in the Blender

When you grow up in several different countries, it impacts you differently than when you expatriate (move abroad) as an adult. Adults who expatriate already have an identity. They know where they’re from and because they’re adults, they know how things work in their country – what is appropriate, what people mean when they don’t say something straight, and what is right and wrong. But children are constantly learning how things work. They watch adults around them to learn from them. Who they will become is still open. When you move between countries as a child, you continue to learn from adults around you, regardless of the move. It’s just that when you move countries, the world seems to change overnight. Right and wrong changes. What is appropriate changes. What people mean when they don’t say something straight changes.

Because children are still learning about everything, including their culture, they cannot fall back on “their” culture when they move abroad. Adults can remember how everything works “at home”. Children cannot, because they have never known. So there is no choice but to continue to learn from adults around you, no matter where you are or where your parents are from. The result is that you learn some things from each country you have lived in. You learn several ways of being. It’s very difficult to separate the cultures you learn from completely in your mind, because you learned it as a single stream of knowledge. A bit here and there you can probably say is from one country or another. But experiencing the stream of different cultures teaching you about life cannot be analyzed and split neatly into boxes, each with part of a culture in it. The different cultures become one integrated point of view in you. You think about life differently from people who have only gotten one kind of cultural input. That way of experiencing life in several cultures at the same time, from memory and from current experience, is living in the third culture. Children who grow up in the third culture are called third culture kids.

I am a third culture kid, and this blog is written from my third culture perspective. I can’t say that I’m from anywhere. If I name a place, I feel like I’m lying, because there are other places that undeniably made me who I am today. However, I’m not allowed to name more than one place or answer “none”. You’re supposed to be from one single place, not three or four, let alone six or more, like some TCKs. Sometimes I feel like I’m not allowed to exist because I can’t name one place I’m truly from. Most people aren’t aware that children learn from their surroundings so intently, regardless of relationship between the country they’re in and their parents’ country/countries. It’s not something most people can relate to, and it’s not something most parents think about. The purpose of this blog is to create a space for me the way I am, with my undefinable mix of cultures and ideas, to let others see one example through the third culture kid looking glass of how the world can look if you’re lacking in a sense of home, but all the richer in feeling like a global citizen.