On the other hand, I watched the Baader Meinhof Complex and Grand Ècole today. Watching stories in European settings made me keenly aware of how I experience distant proximities – things that are physically distant but feel emotionally close – because I’m a third culture kid. I recognize the leftist rhetoric of the RAF from Sweden. I knew kids in school whose parents were in some radical leftist organization that was spied on by the secret police. I recognize the styles of conversation, the landscapes, the apartment highrises. They look like the one my parents are sleeping in as I type. And I realized that my husband can watch such movies but not see the same thing I see, because it’s both emotionally and physically distant to him.

I also met a man from Mexico at a barbecue last week. I could see we were very similar – insiders and outsiders at the same time. I recognized the looks he got from the others for telling funny stories about Brazil, Portugese, and his Spanish. (Which were similar to some of my Swedish-Norwegian stories.) But I also recognized the ease with which he sat down in a patio full of white Americans. He was not a stranger, he belonged – if only more visibly partially than I, who am white and sound like and American when I speak. I knew he knew when we both said the same thing about disliking communism because we knew so much about it at the same time. And I was right – he married an American too.

My husband thought it was strange that I thought we had had shared experiences. I think it is strange that he cannot see. But this – this is more than just paperwork. These experiences and differences in how I and locals in my life see things, these are the things I wanted to blog about. So here’s a new post, for once in a long time.

I am an adult TCK. I haven’t lived with my parents in years, and they’ve moved here and there since I moved out and it’s been mostly fun. So why does it feel so hard now, of all times? Shouldn’t it have felt harder to pack up two suitcases and fly off to college on another continent than the one my parents were on when I was 18? Or more inconvenient to be in touch when they were in China and I was in the US?

Perhaps it ’should’ have, but it wasn’t at all. Part of it may be that I am now giving up something without anything in return. When I was going to college, a new exciting part of my life was starting ‘in exchange’. But I think a bigger part of it is that I have now had time to grow some family roots here. Not just my own roots, but shared roots – old college friends, husband, in-laws – and parents in the same area. I had gotten used to being able to reach out with a phone call at any time I am awake to anyone else of importance in my life. I simply got used to my world being geographically proximate and cycled into a phase of my life where other identities than being a third culture kid were more salient to me.

My parents’ sudden move ripped a big part of that geographically proximate world out and away. All four of us – me and my husband, my mother and father – had implicitly imagined seeing each other from time to time for dinner, or a day or so, and if we decided to have children my parents would be able to drive a few hours to be there, and there would be general family support and advice and love. Not so anymore. There would be a delayed call or an email. Again.

Another part of why I am so sad is probably where they are moving to. I don’t like Sweden, and so am not excited about their new home. We’ve all already lived there, so it’s not new and exciting. No one is excited about the particular city they’re having to move to. The sense of new opportunity, knowledge, and experiences is completely missing. This isn’t an opportunity to expand life, it’s a recession.

I think I am catching a glimpse of why locals seem to think expatriation is this mind-bogglingly difficult and taxing thing to do. When you only focus on what you are losing, it seems hard indeed.

I had never in a million years expected to feel this way about someone who has never left their country of birth. I read sometime right after we had become a couple that children of alcoholics have similar problems as TCKs, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s why. His mother is an alcoholic and his father a drug user, and somehow he got through his childhood, went to college, and got a PhD. Why we should have similarities with children of alcoholics I don’t know. I’d try to find out if I wasn’t so very busy planning a wedding and writing my thesis. Perhaps a project for the future.

This is where the culture mess starts. I should have asked about ring metals. I bought a plain 18k yellow gold band without particularly thinking about it – because the only cultural tradition I know that has men wearing engagement rings also holds that an engagement ring is an 18k gold band. Turns out metal choices are more subject to fashion in the US, and what’s more, yellow gold looks old-fashioned to my fiance. So that was a failure.

Second, after his initial happiness wore off, he freaked out about the fact that I didn’t have an engagement ring. I told him that wasn’t important, but he insisted not only that we not tell anyone until he got me one, but that it be an American engagement ring. (Diamond ring rather than gold band.) I had no idea having a ring for me was so important. Turns out he was right in gauging the response, though – all of his family immediately asked to see the ring.

Now we’re planning a mostly American wedding. This is a home of mine, and getting married is very low-key (although it’s growing in popularity and hoopla) in Sweden. (The invites will likely look bizarre to my family.) However, I refuse to be given away by my father. That is the most ridiculous part of Anglo weddings, and I’m not playing along with that. It’s our third-culture wedding after all. My fiance fell in love with the carriage ride to the ceremony site that’s part of our wedding package, and so it looks like we’re walking up the aisle together in the Nordic tradition as well. Then we’re throwing an afternoon tea reception, which clearly will involve supervising the hotel quite a bit. Their initial menu suggestion included beef wellington and scallops with bacon.

I imagine all of the guests will be surprised at at least one element of the wedding, if not several. I also imagine there will be a lot of explaining required for everyone to feel like they know what’s going on and what it means. First, my parents are hosting the wedding in the American tradition, which will be normal to our American guests but strange to our Swedish guests. (Not sure how that might look to our Chinese guests.) Then there are the ceremony elements, which will likely be alternately familiar and unfamiliar to all guests. And then there’s how to behave at an afternoon tea, and a lack of a garter toss and a bouquet toss, that may surprise American guests. (The garter toss is just tacky, and I’m not throwing a bouquet to any single female guests that don’t have the right to get legally married.) The cake topper (for the American-style wedding cake) is a 囍 (shuāng xǐ, double happiness).

I’m sort of excited to have so many family members and friends share in my third culture wedding! It’ll be a mess – but it will be our mess. And for once, the majority gets to deal with adjusting to other people’s cultures, and my mixing is just fine. I’m very lucky to have found such a special and open-minded guy!

I’ve seen what property does to you – it binds you to a place. I don’t want to be tied down! What if I change my mind? What if he changes his mind? What if our children are miserable there? What if the ideal place for us to live is somewhere on another continent and we don’t know that because we haven’t been there yet, and we’re about to make a huge mistake? Images and feelings from my failed repatriation flash in front of my eyes. Just like some people want to be with several people at the same time because they can’t choose, I want to live in a few places at once just to hedge my bets. Ideally, I’d like to have a few different kinds of streets leading up to my house, one from China, one with a European city, and I’d like to work at an American company. All of a sudden I want to make getting a job with a lot of travel my #1 priority. Can I really commit to a single place in a single country for the rest of my life?

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.

I don’t think I’m in an unusual situation. Parents of TCKs may want to think ahead about how to provide resources for their children to use vocabulary they learn in one language in their other languages – if my mother hadn’t bought me the English-Finnish technical dictionary, I’d be even worse off.