Sometimes, perspectives that you may have because of another culture are held by people that never left that culture as well. I always find that somewhat reassuring. It shows that even though you may have arrived at the opinion or idea using different cultural pathways (as opposed to logical arguments) you can still end up in the same place (usually a logical argument) sometimes. Maybe even a place of partial belonging?

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?

Åsa’s father was very keen to keep their apartment good-looking from the outside and wanted others to look up at their window and think, “A really good woman must live there.” He told Åsa that the women would be so damn suprised if they heard that that’s no woman living there, that’s where steel hardener-master Leif Andersson lives. By following what social conventions and pressures her father is feeling and following, you can see a lot of how gender roles work in Sweden. You can already see it in how Åsa’s mother leaves her father, and how Åsa narrates the book such that you can see why she left, why it was the rational decision to leave, and how his family is different from hers in that regard. She packs up and leaves because it’s for the best. Her father doesn’t find anyone new, really, and the book implicitly explains what’s wrong with him from a Swedish point of view. Åsa herself goes through many boyfriends, as one does. The gender roles are presented so very naturally.

Leif Andersson worked at Metallverken (literally translated The Metal Works, a large steel producer in Sweden), the second large employer in Västerås in addition to ASEA, one of the constituent companies of ABB. She describes how her father biked down the hills to Metallverken to join hundreds of other workers, and the ‘ASEA stream’ of people flowing out of the ASEA gates at 4PM every day. ASEA is why we lived in Sweden to begin with. We just didn’t live in Västerås, the biggest ASEA production center, we lived in Ludvika, ABB’s power development center. Above all, she describes the political rhetoric and the lines of thought in Swedish politics very well. Her mother’s family are communist activists, and her father is a communist but so scared to be found out that he doesn’t dare sign a check with a red pen. Both lines of thought from the 1970s have created the climate in modern Sweden, and Linderborg has the courage (being a leftist political commentator) to show how some (in my opinion, many or even most) Swedish people talk about class oppression as a way to excuse themselves from doing anything about their own situation and actually standing up to authority. (Svenska Dagbladet just featured an article about an entire book to that effect.)

Of course, since it’s in Swedish, you have to be half-way integrated already to be able to read it. However, it helped even me to understand the political situation and how it might feel to be Swedish working class. (And in Sweden, that’s key cultural knowledge. Ignore the working class at your own peril. American Republicans, don’t say a word about your political opinions in Sweden lest you want to be made an example of. Learn some suitable rhetoric about class equality to use instead.) My experience of Sweden is filtered through being a third culture kid, and this includes being not a protagonist but an oppressor on the other side of the class divide. My parent’s friends are mostly engineers with well-used passports. They had some really local friends, but they were mostly open-minded or Finnish immigrants. (Large numbers of Finns moved to Sweden after the Continuation War, because job opportunities were so bleak in war-torn Finland.) No one spoke of class conflict at dinners. My experiences with the working class is being insulted and judged by people like Leif Andersson, and despite that, it was a very endearing read. If you need to know more about why Swedes are the way they are and how they think, read this book.

In Hotelland, I am everywhere and nowhere, exactly where I’m from. It’s tremendously comforting to belong somewhere. I belong at the Marriott more than all these people around me, who are just visiting from Localland. Who don’t see that the head chef isn’t doing a good job. Who miss local things. I can see why lots of TCKs end up in hospitality management. This is probably what Saskia Sassen is talking about in her essay “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims”. I feel at home in the San Fransisco Marriott because I’ve already felt at home in Marriotts elsewhere. Hotelland comes with me, and to some extent I do want Hotelland to push Localland aside. Although I hate touristy areas of any town because they’re inauthentic, authenticity doens’t bother me much when it comes to Hotelland. It’s what I’ve got, in terms of not constantly having to work to understand everyone in Localland worldwide, whereas no one even considers that they need to understand me too. And because of that, I wish Hotelland were bigger. The locals have so much space, they can afford to give some of it to us, the global nomads. The entire world is theirs! They have roots everywhere. The only roots I have are in the air – is it too much to ask for some space for them, too? They tend to get squished in the scramble for space in Localland.

Anyway, returning to the original topic, from Hotelland I know how to make anywhere a new home. While sipping my Cosmopolitan (no pun intended) , I started thinking about a word I saw on TCKID: xenofilia. The word stuck with me, because it was a bit of a surprise. Logically, it’s the obvious opposite to xenophobia, but somehow it never occurred to me that there was a direct logical opposite – I always thought of the opposite of xenophobia as comopolitanisms. The poster who used it implied briefly that TCKs were xenophiles. In a sense, maybe that’s true. As much as I complain about being poorly understood myself despite having to understand all the locals, I do enjoy getting to know new cultures, things, thoughts and foods. However, I don’t think of them as xeno – as alien or Other – simply things that exist that I don’t know yet.

There are two cultural phenomena I can think of that makes me relate in an alienated way. One is widespread sexism, like in the Middle East. Being a woman whose parents are feminists from some of the most egalitarian countries in the world and having spend ten years in the most egalitarian country on earth as a child, I feel like someone’s trying to cut off my arms sometimes when men from very sexist countries start opening their big mouths. Sexist men from less sexist countries tend to get a hammer in the head from someone in their own culture – often another man – that makes it a cultural deviation, not a rule I’d have to abide by when I interact with them. Locals throwing hammers at sexists gives me permission, too.

The second is hyperlocalism. People who are from a small town somewhere in the world and have never left scare me, because my repatriation went very poorly at the hands of such people. People with strong regional accents make me a bit uncomfortable, as if one moment they will be smiling at me and then biting me in the neck the next, after screaming OUTSIDER!!!. Small towns can be cute, but to me they’re a bit scary. I don’t want to stay long, and I don’t want to step out of the “I’m just passing by” role. There is no Hotelland in those places, they are too small. Our kind does not go there enough. I was ostracized by people who look just like me and where I didn’t speak the language with even a hint of an accent. If real xenophobia can come out even when there is no tangible difference to seize on, what will happen when there is? When my parents briefly moved to 合肥 (Héféi), I could feel the localism coming at me immediately. I don’t even know exactly what I picked up on. Something about how people looked at me that I recognized from Sweden, even though they were looking a lot more because I looked foreign. Something about how they talk to each other. I’m not sure. But it was scary. I felt like I was back in the small Swedish town where I lived during my repatriation and I almost had a panic attack.

That’s why Hotelland is such a pleasure to be in. If I don’t open my mouth, I could be from anywhere. I am from anywhere. I could have arrived from anywhere in the world. I could fly to anywhere when I leave. I both belong and am free.

References

Sassen, S. (2000). Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims. In F. J. Lechner and J. Boli (Eds.), The Globalization Reader (pp. 70-76). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

It would be easier to have a teacher, but there aren’t many 太极拳 (tàijíquán) masters where we live. The course I took earlier was given by an American who was taught by a Korean. The teacher counted in Korean, which confused me endlessly. I get confused if 太极拳 (tàijíquán) is presented clearly outside a Chinese cultural context. Some sort of fusion or third culture context works too, but if the keynote isn’t Chinese I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do or how I’m supposed to relate to the teacher. It seems easier to put myself mentally in China and remember without support than to associate another culture with 太极拳 (tàijíquán). (I’m sure this is how cultural mismemories among immigrants and expats are formed.) But nonetheless, having been foiled by PAL video on an NTSC TV, we’ll just have to use distant proximities to imagine ourselves in the room where we practiced with fog and green bamboo outside in the valley, or in one of our parks with new concrete paths and sculpted landscapes, or on the roof of our building with the 扬子江 (Yángzǐ Jiāng) flowing beneath us, visible through the special fog- and pollution-mediated light. It’s surprisingly easy sometimes.

Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, is using her global, cosmopolitan outlook to both make the world a better place and money, says CNN Money. This woman is fantastic. Not only has she made it to the top as a woman of color/foreigner relative to the United States, she might get a US government post (Haha! A cosmopolite in US government!) and started out at BCG – she believes in gut health, gets along with people and is telling Davos participants companies like PepsiCo have to have responsibility for people’s health. Bet you didn’t know Naked Juice is owned by PepsiCo. And profits are up. And she worked for ABB – she’s practically my big sister! Although I don’t like some of the descriptions in this article (“mother hen”? Uh, what? Is that any way to describe a CEO?) , she is described as someone who “brings her whole self” to the office. She’s already done so many of the things I’d like to do. Now I have a second person to look up to in addition to Nokia’s (ex) Sari Baldauf.