This man talks to the world almost exactly like I would. I think many of us third culture kids know that in some general sense, our lives are like prototype lives in the future, when cultural globalization starts catching up to economic globalization. I didn’t expect to see a third culture kid openly espousing third culture values in my lifetime as president of any country, let alone the only Western country that is still very nationalistic. I thought the revolution would start in a small European country in my old age, when my generation had gotten older and let old ideas for an old world go. With Obama’s election, I have gone from feeling culturally marginalized to feeling like I unconditionally belong, not only here but anywhere. If a TCK can get elected president here, we can make our way anywhere, no matter how parochial things may seem.

In fact, the International Herald Tribune has an article about the extended first family, which speaks English, Indonesian, French, Cantonese, German, Hebrew, Swahili, Luo and Igbo. How normal is that in the third culture? My family speaks Finnish, Swedish, Polish, German, Chinese and English. I can relate to these people. Everybody is a unique product of place, culture, and genes, but belongs together. Connects. There is no Other simply because of someone’s culture or genes. Otherness happens because of refusal to connect and understand others, because of closemindedness. And now we have a mini-UN third culture family in the White House!

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 Singapore for 5 years. But the guy beside me went:”Stand up! Didn’t you say you were born in Indonesia?”

So I stood up. The teacher continued: ” If you’re from China, Taiwan or Hongkong, sit down”

I sat down as my mother was from Taiwan and because I’ve spent part of my childhood there. The guy beside me told me to stand again.

The teacher, who noticed me standing and sitting at invervals asked me why was I doing what I was doing. And continued to ask if I understood Chinese and where exactly am I from.

I repiled in Chinese:” My mother is from Taiwan so I’m sort of Taiwanese. I’ve lived in Singapore for almost half my life, so you can say I’m abit of a Singaporean. Lastly, I’m Indonesian because I was born in Indonesia.”

The teacher shook his head and went: ” Are you confused or something? If someone asked where you’re from, they ask for your passport nationality .”

wtck also recently posted a conversation with someone who insisted that they pick a country.

These are the kinds of experiences that tell you very directly that you should not exist. It may seem like a mere slight, but over time, when you get told time and time again, all over the world, that you cannot and should not exist, it really gets to you.

Maybe it has something to do with missing being in a place where I visibly live in the third culture. Here in the US, I’m a hidden immigrant. Sometimes I just want permission to be weird and go with it. I met another TCK through Facebook here where I live, and she mentioned that some of my feelings are being out of step with your peers. She’s right, that’s another thing – I want to do things that my peers here don’t want to do, like sing karaoke and go clubbing. I want to go have fun in new ways my parents didn’t, and that makes me out of step with my peers. And missing other places where people do those things.

It might also have something to do with another thing my friend said. She described where we live as ‘monochromatic’, and I know exactly what she means. Being in contact with several cultures at the same time is like living in a rainbow of color and texture. Living in only one culture can be boring, frankly, and maybe I just want out for the sake of getting out, and what better place to experience it all at once than in the third culture?

Essentialist views of identity are responsible for a great deal of the cultural marginalization that third culture kids can encounter. The ‘push’ to be one nationality or another, once race or another, whatever stark choices we are asked to make – stems fundamentally from the idea that we have some sort of magic ‘essence’ inside us, bestowed by some unclear combination of genetics and birth place, that determines who we are. Perhaps one of the strongest resistances third culture kids as well as multiracial people in race-salient environments face comes from the emotional discomfort and lack of closure we create for people with essentialist views of identity.

When your parents don’t give birth to you anywhere remotely close to where your genes evolved, it becomes hard to argue that there is magic essence in your birth place that can make you completely different from your parents. (Of course, unless you abandon essentialism and acknowledge the role that society plays in shaping us.) On the other hand, when you repatriate and act like you’re a foreigner, it is hard to argue that genes and ethnicity holds magical essence powerful enough to eradicate cultural divides. (I myself am an example of that.) Multiracial people challenge essentialism, even when they’ve only lived in one country. Third culture kids challenge essentialism in both ways mentioned above. And multiracial third culture kids just give people identity politics dyspepsia.

I’ve seen expats do some (to me) bizarre things that just seem maladaptive for themselves, things that don’t hurt or annoy the locals but cause significant inconvenience for the expats. I’ve gotten the feeling before that expats do impractical things in host countries (like after 4+ years in China, wearing diamond and gold earrings to markets) because they think that if they integrate, they will disappear somehow. As if not wearing expensive jewelry that serves as an identity marker in their home country but means something else in their host country will make their identity erode day by day. It sounds and seems so ridiculous to me that I figured that there must be some fantastically compelling emotional reward for doing these sorts of things that I’m unaware of. After some more observation, thinking about what I do instead and why I do that, I started to zoom in on identity issues.

Perhaps it is fair to assume that expats who are integrating poorly are simply afraid, then. Identity is a very potent thing, as third culture kids that identify as such know, and maybe pre-move training for expats ought to include an explicit discussion that challenges essentialist views of identity in a constructive way, by showing how you will not disappear if you adjust to a new culture. In fact, if you expatriate for the first time as an adult, you are virtually guaranteed that you will never cease to be what you started out as culturally. The odds that you are so good at cultural adjustment that you forget all about your life so far are so small, they can be dismissed. You are far more likely to not integrate enough, and have daily frustrations and problems as a result. Out of the two, the latter is clearly the case to worry about.

At least, I think that’s why I get a crushing sense of wanting to be somewhere completely different sometimes. Last week, I almost started crying in my car in the parking lot outside the grocery store I shop at, because the whole thing was so ridiculously American that it was like a bad joke, and exaggregated movie, and I didn’t want to be in it. I wanted to be approaching a Chinese grocery store (on foot) with Chinese things and foods inside, smell the smells of a Chinese supermarket and the smells in the air outside. I wanted to take a taxi with my groceries home. Maybe even argue with the cabbie about the short ride and whether he should or shouldn’t take me. There was some American 80s music playing inside, and it was irritating me immensely.  There were 372469175 kinds of large bags of chips and 2L bottles of soda, and aisles upon aisles of pre-made food in boxes and cans where there should have been regular food, like dried berries, rice, or dried mushrooms. (We read in some expat materials before the China move that Chinese are obsessed with fresh food. I wasn’t sure what that meant, and was even more confused once in a Chinese supermarket – there was lots of frozen, dried and preserved food. Now that I’m living in the US as an adult and shopping, I’m 99.9% sure that whoever wrote that Chinese are obsessed with fresh food was American. From their point of view, everyone must be obsessed with fresh food.)

From time to time, something jilts me and I see the country I’m in as if I just stepped off the plane and don’t understand why the locals do such silly things.  I think it’s a cumulative effect of many small reminders that people don’t appreciate how much their culture determines their reality and that to explore Reality, others’ realities also have to be explored, and therefore culture considered, like I said above. But I’m not quite sure. I had no idea why I didn’t want to be in the United States all of a sudden at the time, and my theory is mostly an after-the-fact construction.  I wonder if this is something all third culture kids go through, or whether it’s just me. I wasn’t irritated at anything in particular that Americans do at the time. I just got incredibly bored of being here. And why in the supermarket parking lot? Not a clue.

My boyfriend, however, remembered nothing at all, because he’d never heard it before. Never. Not once. A quick look at the comments under the clip shows I’m not the only one going “Ohhh.. it’s THAT song! I remember that from when I was a teenager!” It seems I’ve uncovered another song that never made it Stateside. Like No Limit by 2 Unlimited.

I loved 2 Unlimited, and like most people (in Europe), the first song of theirs that I heard on the radio was No Limit. Even after buying all of their other albums, that was still my favorite song. Again, judging by the comments on YouTube below the clip, I’m not alone.

Example comments:

thorinho1 (8 hours ago)

How do you know you are getting old.

When songs from your teenage years are categorized as an oldie

BTW, had a major crush on the female half of 2 Unlimited.

Akaitsuki85 (1 day ago)
haha a good oldie! I remember loving this song so much when I was younger well nostalgy is a beautiful feeling!
On the other hand, often a song will come on the radio, and he’ll turn it up and say “This is such a good song” and I’ve never heard it before.

savke87 (1 day ago)
This is one of the best songs ever. Hello from Serbia

vegunited06 (2 days ago)
all i can picture in my head now is school discos i had in the 90s

smartXtart (3 days ago)
ahhhgg brings back soo many memories, this song was huge in its time!

These old Europop songs are remembered by people across Europe and probably Australia. Even in Serbia, with everything that was going on there at the time. They’re shared culture, really. Global culture. Another one I’m quite sure never made it across the pond is Blümchen’s Heut’ Ist Mein Tag.

Not even Hey Boy! Hey Girl! (Chemical Brothers) made it over.

The summer that that song was big, I was on IRC a lot. One day when I was listening to the song, an Israeli guy said “Hey girl” when I came into the IRC channel. To which I of course replied “Hey boy”, he said “Superstar DJs” and I finished it off with “Here we go!” I’d bet 50 Euro that would never happen with an American.

Sometimes I feel so alone, knowing that no one who’s actually here recognizes these songs. They’re a distant proximity to me, and they’re just weird songs to the people around me. Sometimes it feels like they’re not real because they’re not real to the people around me like they’re real to me. It makes you wonder if maybe you’re wrong, even when no one’s saying that you’re making it up. (However, I have been accused of making up car brands, like Pontiac.) But perhaps what makes me feel the loneliest isn’t that no one around me knows these songs in particular, but that virtually no one knows what a distant proximity feels like in the first place. Very few people around me can feel like something right across the world is down the street, and that really makes me feel lonely sometimes.

Looking at the Lidu website, I found the videos showing apartments. I almost cried. That’s our furniture! Those are our sofas, our dining room chairs, our layout… That’s home, almost exactly! I wish I could step into the video, go to the sofa and turn on StarTV. Or look out the living room window to look at ISB and the big foreign cars in the parking lot. Or walk into my room and see the scroll that’s on the wall to my right over my bed. But as for so many others, home is a combination of time and space. The Lidu isn’t as it was, and no one in our family lives anywhere in China anymore. My visa has expired for good. I have pages and pages of Z visas that are no good to me now. There are two more ring roads now. I can never go home.

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.