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.

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!

Obama is the only politician in any country that I have heard who really touches my heart. He is like me in a way no other politician I’ve seen. His message, approach and attitude are like balm on wounds. This man can allow me to feel like I have a place in the US after all. The neocons have lost, hopefully permanently. It’s not just the wow factor of a TCK getting elected in a fantastically nationalistic country – his attitude and approach feel so intimately familiar. He is averse to burning bridges and acts as if he himself can be one at any time. He understands that any of his words may be picked up by news media and broadcast anywhere in the world, and addresses a global audience accordingly. He thinks about whom he’s talking to and makes changes to make them comfortable – by, say, wearing a silly American flag pin. I wouldn’t have worn one either.

Sweden had a very bad prime minister for quite a while, up until the last election. But who cares if Sweden’s prime minister is an idiot other than the Swedes? No one. The prime minister of Sweden has no power to inflict suffering on others. The president of the United States, however, can and might. I have high hopes that the coming one knows and understands the responsibility he carries.

Conversations with non-Americans have made me think about this country for a while now. While I certainly have my TCK moments, out of the countries that I’m connected to, there is nowhere I’d rather be.  Compared to being ostracized in Sweden, too open and continental in Finland, or forever Other in China, I can very reasonably claim to belong here and others accept me as one of ‘theirs’. And by now, not only is my life here, I have a history here.

I have old college friends. I have a Social Security card that’s getting worn around the edges. I have memories of driving to Chicago, to Minneapolis-St. Paul, to Maryland, to Florida. Of the Atlantic City beaches as a child, Captiva Island beaches as a teen, and Wrightsville Beach as an adult. I have a lease, a car, furniture. All my files are on letter-size paper (as opposed to A4). I give times in AM and PM. Now that my parents re-expatriated to the States, even my family is here.

When I was in the midst of living in Sweden knowing that my pain, loneliness and depression were because of repatriation and seeking out non-Swedes obsessively on the Internet (back then it was all IRC), someone told me that I shouldn’t forget we’re all under the same sky. I looked out the window and cried, wishing fervently that I was under another spot of the same sky.

Now I can look up and I am. I pulled off The Great Escape. I have nothing left in Sweden that can pull me back there. The last time I saw the Atlantic, I saw it from Coney Island, walking in the sand, eating a corn dog, with an old friend I’ve known since freshman year in college. He moved to New York and I was visiting. And I buried my feet in the sand, smelled the sea, and looked out toward the horizon, knowing I was literally an ocean away from my personal vision of hell. Buried in my own history over here. Brought there by life already lived here, that keeps me here, safe, in the best place to be a TCK I’ve ever experienced.

I have never held anything but an American driver’s license. Happy 4th of July.

Reel 2 Reel’s I Like To Move It (insert giggle of recognition here) similarly clearly has traditionally non-European influences and performes, and who cares? That doesn’t mean much to me, or most of the Europewide listeneers either, I imagine. It’s our song, simply because it was a hit.

More recently, there’s Boom Boom Boom. The video has people in Illinois basketball jerseys and various American pop culture, but I’m fairly sure that it’s safe to say it’s not an American song. They’re just using the American stuff as props to make it look more international and new, but given how you can identify your taste in music by saying ‘electronica’ and that makes sense to people here (as opposed to rock, country, r&b, rap, or hip-hop), I would assume that most of these songs were always meant for local consumption. Here, you can see fairly clearly how what Americans might consider black music speaks on behalf of the US as a whole. (For those who are thinking about Rednex, think about how we laugh at that song compared to most Europop.)

Look at the comments under all these songs on YouTube in various languages. We’re all feeling united by the music, rather than divided. That’s just what happens in an era of globalization. People move around. They bring music with them. They get influenced. That doesn’t mean we’re all the same. It just means new things are happening.

I feel a little alone again – very few of my friends might know what any of those songs are. Even the largest club or Europop anthems never made it here, and neither did the unifying and open music culture.

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.

I was in a pub with a television turned to CNN with a college friend and my boyfriend recently. I was facing the TV and could read the captions. Some sort of discussion show was on, and to my great astonishment, two white, middle-aged, male Americans were talking about “the media” as if they in the act of being televised weren’t part of it, and then started discussing the “liberal media”. The “liberal media” is a conspiracy theory that some American conservatives believe that’s like a mutation of the libel that Jews own all the newspapers, except in this case it’s “liberals”. (Don’t be confused like I was initially upon re-expatriating to the US: the word “liberal” may have nothing to do with the political movement of liberalism and might be defined very loosely as “person American conservatives don’t like”, including libertarians, communists, and gay people. There is no ideology attached to “liberal” here.) So I’m sitting in this bar, choking on my pint, and I remember the paper I wrote and the professor’s comment, and realize in a flash what he meant was that to believe that the US media isn’t biased was unusual. But I had just re-expatriated to the US and had been taking in a fare of European news over the past 10 years or so, followed by CNN International and BBC World.

Perhaps American politics gets its unique attributes from the poor communication of real news to the American people. I don’t know if it’s been this way for a long time, or whether this is something that started occurring with the rise of the neoconservatives around the time we repatriated. But one thing is for certain, namely that most US newscasts are about on par with Chinese when it comes to objective reporting and truth-seeking. I’ve been trying to understand how Bush got re-elected and how people in the US were so taken in by what (to me) was obviously propaganda. Maybe the news is the key to understanding what happened.