Myth of the Third Culture Kid

The Jakarta Post - WEEKENDER   |  Fri, 02/20/2009 3:21 PM  |  Said & Done

During my first week of university I got an invitation in my mailbox for a special orientation for “Third Culture Kids”. It was the first time I’d ever heard the term, but apparently the International Student Office staff had been briefed on the atypical characteristics that define “TCKs” or, alternatively, “Global Nomads”. They were fascinated with our fluency in so many foreign cultures, sympathetic with our estrangement from our places of citizenship.

The event ended up being a bit of a contrived attempt for everyone to get to know each other by going around and summing up our lives in a few key points. Mother from here, father from there, born elsewhere, grew up everywhere. A bit of a tedious custom that we “TCKs” have grappled with ever since leaving our international schools.

When I was 10 years old or so I went to an international school here in Jakarta. My best friends and I formed a club, as kids often do, and called ourselves “DHVE” after our names, Diana, Hana, Vicky and Elisabeth. Not exactly innovative, but to the point.

Part of the need to create a club name came from this after-school activity we had invented with the boys in which we turned the school grounds into a battleground for rubber band wars, where we launched paper pellets at each other with that preteen confusion of flirtatiousness and competition.

We girls started to mark our pellets with our “logo”, as if we wanted to make sure that these boys knew exactly who they were dealing with. Personally I don’t remember much pellet firing, mostly just the thrill of the game, except for the one fateful afternoon when Diana nailed one of the boys right on the ear (the son of a teacher!) turning it so bright red that we were pretty sure it was going to fall right off his head. Soon after, Lizzie started interrupting our wars with declarations of peace and we went back to playing Four Square instead.

Fifteen years later, three of the four of us are in fits of laughter over this memory during a lunch of noodles in Pondok Indah Mall, the same place that used to be the coolest place to meet other than Blok M Plaza, what with the waterslides and Baskin and Robbins. The last time I had seen them we were reading Archie comics, listening to Guns ‘n’ Roses and playing Truth or Dare. Now we barely knew where to start to update each other on our lives.

Vicky, who usually commutes to Jakarta from Singapore at least once a week for her demanding job, couldn’t make it. “When I don’t want to come to Jakarta I get sent there,” she had written to us, “and of course when I want to come I don’t.”

“Are you sure she’s in Singapore?” Diana asked me, “I thought she was in Ho Chi Minh or something?” I thought I had known but realized that either place was just as possible. How could we keep up?

Lizzie, who had been living in Afghanistan and in Bangladesh before that, happened to be in town for three days on her way to Yogya for an intensive Indonesian course. We asked her which of The Most Dangerous Places in The World she was planning on traveling to next and she replied with a knowing grin, “Somalia. There’s nothing going on there.”

After eight years in the Royal Navy, Diana was barely a week into her one-year teaching contract in Jakarta and was already daydreaming about all her upcoming adventures: getting certified to teach scuba diving in Thailand and snowboarding in the French Alps. Meanwhile she was already loving being back in Jakarta. “I had job offers from Italy, Prague, Spain and China, but coming here just made the most sense really, sort of a home away from home.”

I had just come from a whole slew of adventures between the US and Southeast Asia and was on my way to New Zealand before heading to France to make a short animated film with my husband. It was an amazing stroke of luck really that, considering all the places where we had made homes all over the world, we were meeting again where we had first met. And while we reveled in each other’s stories, there was no summing up required, no tired answers to open-ended questions of identity or settling or definitions of home, just colorful snippets that pretty much said it all.

We were all too familiar with the different versions of answers to that overrated question, “so where are you from?” anyway: the long one, the longer one, and the abruptly short one (“I’m from here”). You learn these after trying out several other vague replies, like being from everywhere or nowhere or both.

If there’s something Third Culture Grown-Ups know more than anything else, it’s that the myriad events and experiences that define anybody are just too dynamic to pin down. Ultimately, trying to neatly slot us into a “third culture” really just isn’t saying enough.

+ Hana Miller

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