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!

Once a business brat, perhaps always a business brat – I feel very alive in business casual clothes giving presentations to clients or cracking a problem with my team. It feels real in a way even my own research doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my research – but perhaps because I have seen my parents and their friends crack business problems across time zones and borders since as far back as I can remember, when I get to dig my teeth into a business problem or need to make a recommendation, I get excited like I’m about to take a ride on my favorite roller coaster.

Even today when I consciously know better, somehow what adults do is travel a lot, call a lot of people, get called about problems, wear suits, ties and trenchcoats and Loden coats and carry briefcases. I feel different in my white ironed blouses and my pinstriped skirt than I think most people around me do – I feel ready to play and ready to win.

My perspective, as a white third culture kid living in the US, is that there is a clear split in identity politics implications between saying anything at all about hip-hop depending on whether it is American or not. Perhaps because I am an outsider, I do not particularly feel like country music, which is apparently music that white people listen to, has anything to do with my identity. I am neither a connoisseur of American hip-hop nor country music, but I feel included in neither.

I know I don’t know anything from personal experience of what the more sophisticated hip-hop talks about. I’m a business brat who grew up on three continents because of my parents’ socioeconomic status. I’ve encountered cultural marginalization and repatriation difficulties, not racism or economic disadvantage. For me to pretend that I can personally relate to what hip-hop artists sing about would be ridiculous. (Also, my behavior and mannerisms attest to that.) That doesn’t mean that I don’t like it and don’t want to hear it. I like learning about others’ experiences, and hip-hop voices such experiences through one of my favorite mediums – music. Hearing about other people’s pain and oppression isn’t threatening, it’s an opportunity for connecting to others. On the other hand, the racial climate here makes me a little nervous about expressing that opinion, because I don’t know how Americans might interpret it in terms of identity politics. I have no idea if the message will be understood as meant.

Country music, however, makes me slightly uncomfortable. I’m certainly not included – although I’ve hiked, canoed, and spent a lot of time in the outdoors, far away from big cities, it has little relationship to what the American countryside is portrayed as. Also, it doesn’t help that people from small places make me a little nervous, simply because people from small places were mainly responsible for my reptriation problems. The image of country music is all about American nationalism, localism, and parochialism. Obviously, they explicitly exclude me.

However, like I’ve written about before, hip-hop from other countries than the US makes the message less enveloped in identity politics of the sort that I’m not confident I understand. I can listen to French hip-hop or Chilean hip-hop without any concern over what kind of an racial identity or politics statement I’m making to Americans. I don’t necessarily understand any better what growing up in the banlieue is like either, but listening to French-Algerian rappers doesn’t make identity statements on my own behalf like listening to American rap or hiphop seems to.

Moreover, these identity statements stay put in the US. Listening to hiphop or rap only seems to have something to do with race inside the US. As I’ve also mentioned before, those music types are stripped of racial overtones almost completely outside the US, in my experience. It seems like a good example of Arjun Appadurai’s indigenization to me. The music style means one thing in a US American context, but when others use it, it ends up meaning something else. Something else I can enjoy without having to wade through the implications of US history on race relations here.

I played 你快樂我隨意, the S.H.E. song that an American didn’t think sounded American at all, to another guinea pig American. This time, the results were different: my friend could hear the American influence, but pointed out that there was a ‘foreign’ element in the synthesizer. I had to listen to it again, thinking about the synthesizer. I realized I never thought about it, I took it for granted. So perhaps it is really indigenized music that makes me comfortable after all. No need to understand any one country’s identity politics. I’ve got enough going on in that department on my own already. It’s nice to get a break.

Those times when I hear bad news of people dying from a part of the world I know and think “There? I could have been there! I could have died!” are often times when I feel alone. International news so emotionally distant to local people. On the other hand, I felt rather emotionally distant from Hurricane Katrina. I’m not entirely sure why, but one explanation is that I live so thoroughly in a world of distant proximities that I’m just that lacking in patriotic fervor. I may simply feel closer to 北京 (Běijīng) people or 重庆 (Chóngqìng people than New Orleans people, because I conceptualize belonging nearly completely in a transnational, abstract space. It’s always hard to analyze yourself, but this might not only be an example of Pollock and van Reken’s properties of TCKs, but it might also connect that property with experiencing distant proximities strongly and living in Rosenau’s Affirmative Global world.

Maybe I feel for the earthquake victims more than Hurricane Katrina victims because I am very aware of that my life has intertwined with 四川 (Sìchuān), but not with New Orleans. My repatriation has made me keenly aware of the fallacies of assuming commonality because of shared language, partially shared culture and shared genes. I see myself, others and my own identity playing out in a space of emotional connections which are distant proximities. I do not automatically feel connected to people because they superficially ’seem’ like me. The most bitter moments of my life were caused by such people, and in contrast, some of the best were with people who were not superficially like me. I am committed to a global identity in ways that I doubt many expatriates are.

Perhaps our reactions to international news regarding our old homes or places we visited a lot locally is just the visible indicator of what really sets us apart from expatriates or other international-minded people. If I’m anywhere near typical, I just don’t care about people (above and beyond fundamental human dignity) just because they look like me, talk like me, dress like me, or have the same passport as me. All of those have been shown to be poor indicators of real similarity to myself. I feel connected to anyone I’ve met who is open-minded and open-hearted, and I continue to feel that way no matter how far away they are from me at the moment. The strong emotional reaction to bad international news is a natural consequence. 

The effort to identify the knowledge that varies between but not within large cultural groups had led to the conceptualization of cultural knowledge in terms of very general constructs, such as individualistic as opposed to collectivist value orientations, which apply to all aspects of life (Segall et al 1998). With the emphasis on domain-general constructs has come the assumption that the influence of culture on cognition is continual and constant. Cultural knowledge is conceptualized to be like a contact lens that affects the individual’s perceptions of visual stimuli all of the time. This conception unfortunately leaves little room for a second internalized culture within an individual’s psychology. In sum, the methods and assumptions of cross-cultural psychology have not fostered the analysis of how individuals incorporate more than one culture.

I have read some of that type of studies, and I think Hong et al are right. The contact lens analogy is rather apt. Looking within myself, I know that I respond differently in different cultural situations. I am more American when I am in America, more Swedish when I’m in Sweden, more Finnish when I’m in Finland, and more Chinese when I’m in China. I answer questions differently in each cultural context. I know others do, too – my mother was very happy over a real leather (as opposed to plastic or fake leather) handbag she had found in 重庆 (Chóngqìng). I had just arrived from the States to visit, and she was showing me her fantastic, stylish purchase. I thought it were a little old-fashioned in design, for old ladies really, but wasn’t going to hurt her feelings by saying so. She can use whatever handbags she wants, it’s her choice. Later, after my parents had re-expatriated to the States, my mother told me that she had unpacked the handbag, looked at it, and then understood the weird look I apparently had had on my face when she was showing me the handbag in 重庆 (Chóngqìng). What looked good with a Chinese eye in China looked different with a Western eye in the States. I’ve had to discard clothes I’ve bought in China when I’ve looked at them in the West. They might have been fashionable, but in the West they signaled new things that I didn’t want to signal. Somehow, that didn’t occur to me when buying the clothes in China. If aesthetics aren’t preserved when you switch cultural contexts, why would everything else do so? If culture is like a contact lens, why can something as simple to examine as a handbag look different at different times when the culture mix in a person is the same?

This sort of thing has been documented in research on biculturalism (not surprisingly). This kind of change in perspective is called frame-switching in bicultural research and code-switching in nigriescence literature as well as Barbara Schaetti’s doctoral thesis on third culture kid identity (Schaetti, 2001). Code-switching isn’t very easy to explain if you think about cultures as contact lenses, but Hong et al argue that if you think about culture as a network of situation-specific knowledge, like a system of cultural knowledge, it’s easy to make sense of and understand. You can have several networks of knowledge telling you how to behave. Sometimes they might conflict on how you ought to behave in a specific situation, but just having more than one cultural meaning system isn’t hard to analyze. Hong et al write

A first premise is that a culture is not internalized in the form of an integrated and highly general structure, such that an overall mentality, worldview, or value orientation. Rather, culture is internalized in the form of a loose network of domain-specific structures, such as categories and implicit theories (Bruner, 1990; D’Andrade, 1984; Shore, 1996; Strauss, 1992). A second premise is that individuals can acquire more than one such cultural meaning system, even if these theories contain conflicting theories. That is, contradictory or conflicting constructs can simultaneously be posessed by an individual; they simply cannot simultaneously guide cognition. The key to this distinction is that posessing a particular construct does not entail relying on it continuously; only a small subset of the individual’s knowledge comes to the fore and guides the interpretation of a stimulus.

So how do you end up picking a culture to use? They’re saying that you use the cultural knowledge that comes to mind first in a particular situation.

A key concept is that the pieces of an individual’s knowledge may vary in accessibility (Higgins, 1996; Wyer & Srull, 1986). The more assessible a construct, the more likely it is to come to the fore in the individual’s mind and guide interpretation. But what determines whether a piece of knowledge is highly accessible? A long-standing hypothesis in cognitive and social psychology holds that a construct, such as a category, is accessibel to the extent that it has been activated by recent use (Brunner, 1957).

In other words, you tend to use whatever cultural ideas that you’ve been using recently. So even though I “ought” to have known better about the clothes, I didn’t, not because I had forgotten about the West but because the Chinese way of thinking came into mind the fastest, because I used it all the time.

In their study, Hong et al got Hong Kong Chinese to be more cooperative in the Prisoner’s Dilemma after seeing images like a dragon and 中 (zhōng, middle and the first character of ‘China’), 天安门 (Tiānānmén, the Gate of Heavenly Peace), and Confucius and less cooperative after seeing images like an American flag, the White House, and a portrait of Lincoln compared to a group that saw landscapes. The point is to show that people who know more than one culture tend to use the one they were reminded of last. They point out at the end of the paper that based on other previous research, language is probably such a reminder of culture.

This way of thinking about culture – in terms of networks of concepts – makes it easy to come up with a precise theory of how a third culture kid is different from not only people who have lived only in one country, but also from other cross-cultural people. I think that the difference lies in how those multiple networks get connected. Bicultural people might have cultural network A and cultural network B. (Yes, I know, it was very imaginative to name them that. I take full credit.) In some situations, they use network A, and in others, they use network B. There is an example of this related in the paper.

Consider, for example, the following experience of a Mexican American individual:
At home with my parents and grandparents the only acceptable language was Spanish; actually, it’s all they really understood. Everything was really Mexican, but at the same time they wanted me to speak good English… But at school, I felt really different because everyone was American, including me. Then I would go home in the afternoon and be Mexican again. (quoted in Padilla, 1994, p. 30)

Although I can’t speak for other third culture kids, that’s not at all what living in the third culture is like for me. In this example, it would be more like being frustrated that your parents don’t understand English and American culture and that people at school don’t understand Spanish and Mexican culture when you want to use those concepts. For me, my family has always been cross-cultural, since my parents aren’t from the same country, so going home and being a certain nationality has never even been possible for me the way it is for the Mexican-American quoted above. In fact, “home” to me connotes not having to remember which culture network a concept is part of originally. At home, I do as I like, using culture network A one minute, culture network B one minute, and culture network C after that. When I was living with my parents and when I see them now, I speak Finnish with my mother and switch to Swedish when my father comes into the room. We often listen to radio, TV, movies, and performances in other languages with no problems. Then when I went to school or go to work now, everything’s different because everyone and everything is from only one country, and so am I. Sort of. As soon as they encounter another language than their mother tongue, it causes tension, even when they speak it. They pay attention to ‘foreignness.’

I think third culture kids learn more than one culture network and then connect the two together into one to make a third culture network. I think the reason repatriation is so difficult is that we simply don’t know which parts of our third culture network of ideas came from which country, and because the concepts that were from that culture aren’t very assessible at all when you repatriate. I’m constantly discovering where some idea of mine belongs, because it’s just ‘been there’ until something makes me go through a fact of experience encounter. (An encounter where the fact that my experience has been different from others’.) I just construct what feels like a complete culture network from bits and pieces of culture networks from different countries. For example, I didn’t realize until I was around 18 that Americans are very uncomfortable with being naked, even in their families. I reasoned as follows: I know American culture. I’ve been naked around my family since I was born and have never heard of anyone who wasn’t. Therefore, Americans are comfortable with nudity. The fallacy lies in that I had never been in a situation where Americans’ discomfort with nudity came up, and so I didn’t know that that wasn’t part of an American culture network.

Adults who expatriate might make similar mistakes. The difference is that they started with only one culture network developed and are aware of that. When you build your first culture network and it includes more than one culture, you can never ’switch’ completely between cultures like an immigrant. You can’t help but rely on a little of this way of thinking and on a little of that way of thinking. This might be what gives rise to the basic features of third culture kids that Pollock & van Reken have found. (Pollock & van Reken, 2001) I think this constructivist approach to thinking about culture and being part of more than one culture is a very good way to go about explaining what is different about people who are multicultural. It resonates well with my experiences, it ties in with research on both bilingual people (Kanno, 2000) and third culture kids (Pollock & van Reken, 2001). I hope someone in that field sees the connection.

References:

Bruner, J. S. (1957) Going beyond the information given. In University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Psychology (Ed.), Contemporary approaches to cognition (pp. 218-238). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In Hong et al, 2000.

Higgins, E. T. (1996) Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicabilit, and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. E. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of base principles (pp. 133-168.) New York: Guilford Press. In Hong et al 2000.

Hong, Y.-Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-Y., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2000) Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition. American Psychologist, 55(7), 709-720.

Kanno, Y. (2000). Bilingualism and Identity: The Stories of Japanese Returnees. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 3(1), 1-18.

Padilla, A. M. (1994) Bicultural development: A theoretical and empirical examination. In R. G. Malgady & O. Rodriguez (Eds.) Theoreticaland conceptual issues in Hispanic mental health (pp.20-51). Malabar, FL: Krieger.

Pollock, D. C., & van Reken, R. E. (2001). Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc.

Schaetti, B. F. (2001). Global Nomad Identity: Hypothesizing a Developmental Model (Doctoral dissertation, The Union Institute, 2001.) Dissertation Abstracts, 9992721

Segall, M. H., Lonner, W. J., & Berry, J. W. (1998) Cross-cultural psychology as a scholarly discipline: On the flowering of culture in behavioral research. American Psychologist, 53, 1101-1110. (In Hong et at 2000)

Wyer, R. S., & Srull, T. K. (1986) Sociopolitical change and percieved vitality. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10, 459-469.

Centers on cross-cultural study of substantive areas such as personality, motivation, socialization, interpersonal behavior, psychological environments, cognition and cognitive development, ethnocentrism and stereotypes, and visual perception; emphasis on methodological limitations and contributions of cross-cultural study; and discussion of current problems and research. Same as ANTH 373. Prerequisite: Six hours of psychology or anthropology, or consent of instructor.

I’ve only taken one anthropology class before, but cross-cultural psychology is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about! I’ve only really read that article by Markus & Kitayama for my Honors, but that’s it. Graduate student automatic consent ftw!

The professor’s work centers on people who have multiple enculturalizations. Even just reading her publications could be great! I’d go search for them right now if it wasn’t time to go to bed. A completely different world awaits tomorrow – learning image processing in MATLAB. Cultural psychology will have to wait – but hopefully, not for long.

Of course, Europeans express the idea “from another country” all the time – especially in debates about the EU. So what do they say, then? Well, they sometimes use words that I have to translate with “foreign,” but they lack the feeling of far away. In fact, they’re often used about things that are very common, very familiar, well-known and here right now. It has more of an essential overtone of origin, often invoked in slogans for intra-national products like “Suosi suomalaista!” (Favor Finnish [products/stuff/whatever]!) They put the focus more on the national rather than the Otherness of the foreign.

So in other contexts than exhorting consumers to pick local products to support local enterprises or farmers, what does one say? Well, European, for example. European as opposed to national. With the general discussions of the relative roles of the EU and nationstates and the on-going transitions toward integration, the relationship between central EU government – the European – and the individual nationstates – the completely Self – is in the back of your mind. Since one can’t well mean European as opposed to us, whose country is in Europe but is not European, “European” has come to refer more to European as a whole, as a unified concept, as something more general that any nationstate is part of but no more than that. It is both Self and Other, and so its connotations – the way you feel when you say it – is very different from “foreign.”

This type of language usage where region labels are used because there isn’t a neat split between Self and Other is hardly new. Scandinavia and the Nordic countries have had passport-free travel for around 50 years between them for citizens of each other’s countries, and their histories are heavily intertwined, as are their languages with the exceptions of Finland (Finno-Ugric language tree) and Icelandic (From the same tree as the modern Scandinavian languages, but retains many language features that are dead in the others, making it extremely difficult to understand. Think sort of like middle English). Switzerland has always had language diversity within its borders as well as fierce loyalty to a particular valley, creating both strong ties to the very local (the central government is very weak, and always has been) as well as to other countries via language in addition to the nation-state. For someone in a French-speaking valley in Switzerland, France or Belgium cannot be “foreign” in its English sense, even though they are different countries, there are different accents, and all such. When you already speak the language of a country, it is difficult to feel like a complete outsider the way you can if you can’t even separate words out in speech and can’t read a single thing. (Similarly, Americans seem to feel more kinship with other Anglo countries for the same reason, but America is far removed from it’s sisters in a way people in Europe are not.)

Similarly, it seems that for Chinese, there are foreigners and Japanese. “Foreigner” seems to mean non-east Asian but including southeast Asian foreigners. However, there is a a bigger difference in perception between Chinese and Japanese than there is within Europe. Chinese food is Chinese food, Japanese food is different. Their tea is different. Their manners are different. Their culture is different. Although their histories have intertwined, they have not been as intertwined in terms of languages and movements of people as Europe’s countries have been.

Food is, in fact, a good example. Ethnic restaurants in Europe tend to be non-European, like Thai, Chinese, Lebanese, Indian, kebab places, whatever. You won’t see a German restaurant in France or an Austrian restaurant in Spain. Why not? Well, why would you want one? Local restaurants will serve dishes technically from all over Europe, in general, and it’s just food. Wienerschnitzel is a very unremarkable lunch dish, despite a locality being in the name. Cheese is made everywhere – so buying cheese from France is not really different from buying cheese made in Denmark. For a purist, it may matter in terms of quality, taste, and tradition – but my point is that one does not really register a technically foreign cheese as foreign, it’s just cheese. That it comes from all over Europe has more to do with modern cooled transportation than anything else. Wine has no origin, it’s just wine. Some regions drink more of it than others, but some regions drink more milk than others. It feels more like a collective regional preference difference rather than Other. It’s we. We drink wine, we eat cheese, we eat sausages and mash and coq au vin and moussaka and souvlaki and calamari and veal medallions in marsala sauce and schnitzel and beef stew and borscht. We cook with creme fraiche and roux and gravy and butter and olive oil and cream and tomatoes and herbes de provence and herbes, ce ne sont pas de provence. There are, of course, national and regional dishes – but they are few and not as common as all the dishes that are very similar. Those are the things we lift forward as separating marks, maybe with some things that are predominantly eaten in one region, because you don’t notice all the similarities. It’s just taken for granted.

In other ways, too, there is much more mixing than elsewhere. Food is relatively shallow; if that was all there was, one could argue America is very integrated with Mexico. What really has struck me in French class, to return to my starting point, is how little my classmates know about France, how foreign it is to them. La Sorbonne, for example. Le Quartier Latin. Expressions like “C’est la vie.” But even more than that – l’esprit critique, the political discussions, all that. Still more familiar are some fantasy figures, almost icons, like Pierrot. One of my favorite toys as a small child was a turquoise silk Pierrot with a fine porcelain head and hat, sown to a pale yellow silk moon, crying. I so admired and felt sorry for Pierrot – why was he so sad? And why was he on the moon, all alone? But I envied him for sitting on the moon, something I had never done.

Later, in literature class, I did see a Self/Other split – but between European literature and non-European literature. We studied Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, Brecht, Kafka, Ibsen, Voltaire, Strindberg, Shakespeare, all kinds of literature, poetry, and plays, all of which were considered something that one ought to know if one wants to pretend one graduated high school, because it was your literature. Later in the class, we were more free to pick what to study, and in a collective brainstorm we were naming famous authors and books they’ve written. I named almost every single American author and book on the board. Most of them no one had ever heard of except the teacher, who clearly considered them unnecessary. No mention of African, South American, Australian, or Asian literature.

Maybe Europe is the birthplace of one type of cosmopolitanism without being aware of it – a lack of black and white distinction between nationstates that is becoming generally integrated into identity conception, so subtly embedded in society that you don’t even think about it. People like me do so to a completely different degree, and we do so consciously – but maybe Europeans can be the first people to society-wide identify with more than one nation-state. The circumstances are certainly favorable.

In addition, this apartment and what it contains and why it’s there puts me face to face with my need for the third culture. Next to my laptop is a pint glass with Paulaner, and my Paulaner is delicious and it makes me feel connected to… myself, really. European (especially German and English) beer is my beer. Clearly, in my apartment there should be my beer, not someone else’s beer. There is a small tier of lucky bamboo on my end table, because lucky bamboo can be bought in our supermarket and it sits on our coffee table in spring. There are modern birch bookcases and a modern birch desk, because our houses and our apartments were always decorated with modern furniture, like most people’s. There is a laughing Buddha, because it reminds me of dad. There is a scroll with a poem about long life that I bought downtown. My plates and utensils are some of the pinnacles of national design.

You see, when I say “in our supermarket,” I mean Yansha Wangjing Wholesale Warehouse in Beijing. When I look at my lucky bamboo, I see something from Beijing – from home – not something I bought at Lowe’s looking for something else. I see something from our family home that is also in mine – a tradition of sorts. Similarly, when I say “downtown”, I mean “downtown Beijing.” But it feels so close by when I look at the scroll. And when I say “national design,” I mean “Finnish national design.” I have the same plates as we did in Europe, the plates that my mother insisted on having. All these things make me feel closer to some other part of the world or something that is far away. I have pieces of everything in my apartment, and that’s why it feels like home. And that really should tell me – or anyone else – that where I really feel at home is the third culture.

It’s just that I’ve spent 19 years of my life before knowing what a TCK was thinking I was from one country or another. It’s taking some time to fully realize that I am, in fact, a rather typical TCK. I realized this quickly upon reading about it, but emotionally, the realization hasn’t set in quite as fast. I think it’s starting to sink in now, three years later.

Many of my friends who have some fact about themselves that make them different from me in some way society deems/has deemed significant doesn’t really go into the ’similar’ calculation, it plays more of a role like clothing choices or what music you like. It is a difference, just not the sort of difference that really matters when it comes to important stuff. Many of my readers may guess that they may be one. (Heck, in an extended way, everyone is. Even gender doesn’t really register as an important difference in the sense that I don’t see guys as fundamentally different from myself.) If you start saying that people are different from you because of any factual difference you are going to be a very lonely, bitter person. Therefore, it is not difficult to accept that they are not identical to myself – it’s rather unavoidable and we’re still basically similar, so… *shrug*

However, the people who are really dissimilar to me in the way turks are dissimilar to neonazis in the eyes of the neonazis and gays are dissimilar to homophobes in the eyes of the homophobes I am not so tolerant of; local people who don’t care about the global, backlashers, or why not neonazis. Neonazis, however, are a special category, they need special discussion because they’re such a test of the value of free speech and how far it should extend. I do not feel too bothered by my lack of tolerance for neonazis. However, people who live in one of Rosenau’s Local or Isolated worlds are dissimilar to me in a very important way sometimes – I have trouble putting myself in their shoes. I can’t really imagine it very well, especially the Isolated worlds, where it seems that many of the neocons live. In the end, I don’t really want to, because if I’m honest with myself, I find it very difficult to respect their opinions enough to bother. I also feel that my reality checks are much better than theirs.

For example, it’s difficult to believe in the “liberal media indoctrination” when you’ve actually seen old propaganda or news you know isn’t covering the whole story/and or is propaganda. (Interesting related fact: the Chinese still haven’t seen the pictures of the Tiananmen massacre. They know what happened, of course, but they haven’t seen the pictures or video.) It’s difficult to believe in a left-wing conspiracy when you’ve lived in one communist country and another so grassroots socialist that some call it the last bastion of communism on Earth. On the other hand, I have trouble believing capitalism is the root of all evil and that the US has a grand plan to take over the world for the same reason. I also know that Americans aren’t all fake and shallow the way I know that all French aren’t arrogant. I’ve seen things with my own eyes that keep my feet solidly on the ground – or at least so I’d like to think. I have an obligation to make sure I’m right – or to make myself right if I’m not.

We both just thought that it is impossible to explain to an outsider who hasn’t seen it themselves. It’s not a secret per se, but it’s both very personal but above all incomprehensible to most people, it seems. I’ve simply found, like my mom and a lot of other people in the third culture, that if I explain too much about life stories and citizenships and feelings and moving, I cease to be a person and become a misunderstood zoo specimen. I am a person. Therefore, I present myself in such a way that I know I will be met like one – I use the cultural chameleon property most TCKs have.

I feel almost like I felt sophomore year when I found a link to www.tckworld.com – I laughed and I cried and I couldn’t believe that I could be described by an acronym rather than a life story with lots of points that were essentially incommunicable in practice. I’m actually very typical. And now I know that it’s not just Kary and I, there’s people out there who might have gone through the same things we have! I still can’t believe it. Now, if people just knew what all these terms were…

Update: An email later, I realize that we’re all third culture kids. This seems to be a problem stemming from being a hidden immigrant. Kids who are moving back into possible hidden immigrant-ness urgently need support and attention and above less hiddenness. Expatriates raising or thinking of raising children really have to get this kind of information. Really, really, need this kind of information. It’s being discovered by trial and error, but there’s no need for kids who are growing up today to discover what we already have.

This is an reference group orientation exploration milestone for me, I think. (An opportunity for me to explore how other TCKs see things.)
Afterthought: Maybe I do not cross cultures as much as I never exit the third culture. Maybe one can never truly leave one’s culture – including the third.