Culture in the Blender

My boyfriend and I are organizing our finances and decided to use Quicken. I was attracted to the idea of having all my accounts and investments in all countries I have them in displayed in one place. Quicken can show investment accounts and even pull the current performance from the Internet… in theory. It insists [...]

This morning when I switched on the BBC, the first thing I saw was an Al-Arabiya interview of Obama. The words coming out of his mouth – that he’s there to listen first, and that the United States all too often commands – were words I never thought I would hear in a hundred years [...]

Someone posted a very illustrative story about cultural marginalization for third culture kids on TCKID.
In primary school, I was in a public school with a foreign population of 75%.
On the first day I transferred there, a teacher went:” Stand up. Okay… If you’re from Singapore/ Singaporean, sit down.”
I sat down as I had been in [...]

China has been in the news a lot lately, and for some reason I’m missing 北京 (Běijīng) something fierce. I’m meeting a friend for drinks tonight, and I desperately want to go to 三里屯 (Sānlǐtúnr). I want to walk out into the 北京 (Běijīng) night into my safe, familiar third culture world. I [...]

A few days back, I found out in my cultural psychology class that it is true that those expats who believe in essentialism (with respect to either culture or race) have more problems integrating. A study was done at Bei Da of foreigners in Beijing (by sending out researchers to talk to foreigners at Sanlitun, [...]

From time to time, I get little hints from whatever country I’m living in that the perspectives from other countries I occasionally mention or present are irrelevant or easily incorporated into the way of thinking prevalent in the country we’re in. (If you know physics, kind of like they dismiss arguments about needing to consider [...]

While watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica that had originally aired on Australian television, I recognized the song they used in the trailer for the next episode. I couldn’t remember who sang it, but I remembered the name of the song – Spaceman. A little YouTubing later, I remembered it was by Babylon Zoo and [...]

My psychology of culture textbook tells me if you consider a culture to include all individual variations within the culture, cultural differences disappear. For example, the differences between Japanese and American culture disappear. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy as a TCK to take a part of a culture that you like and use that [...]

Having spoken to people so much about my future and having had to stay a night at the Sixth Avenue Inn recently, even though I am back “home” I still feel displaced. I like staying at five-star hotels because it makes me feel a lot like I came home. It reminds me of the Lidu. [...]

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 [...]