I

t was several years ago — and I was a preoccupied, awkward, nondescript teenager. The age of social networking was dawning on me. As I was industriously clicking through every visible tab, I decided to fill in the blank spaces with information about myself that would appear on my Facebook profile page — ranging from current city, birthday and gender to a vain witty self description. However, I found myself somewhat irked when I encountered the word written in bold — hometown.

I was stuck there with thoughts whirling in my head. I find questions such as “What is your hometown?” or “Where do you live?” or even “Where are you from?” more or less baffling, vague, ambiguous. The main reason is that I am a TCK, or a Third Culture Kid. Due to my father’s occupation as a diplomat/civil servant, my family periodically gets deployed to foreign countries. I wasn’t born and bred in the culture that my parents were. I had no clearly defined cultural identity; I had to create my own globalized one.

As a TCK, I see myself as a victim of circumstance. There is a constant struggle of pros and cons — a tug of war between love and hate for being a TCK. And most of the time, the latter tends to pull in most of the rope. Allow me to elaborate. First, I believe in the workings and compromise of individual and situational explanations of behavior, of nature and nurture, as well as free will. But the fact being that I’m a TCK is a major factor in why I am the way I am. It has greatly, and most of the time inconveniently, impacted my behavior and somewhat shaped my personality and attitude. Through it I have become more introverted, but it has also amplified my ability to be self-introspective and empathic.

Secondly, as far as I can remember, the process of adjustment had always been accompanied by problems. To leave what you know and venture into the unfamiliar and unknown and live there is more daunting and forbidding than what it sounds like hypothetically — new people, new school and curriculum, new language, new lessons, new everything. One would think TCKs eventually get used to the whole cycle of fine tuning ourselves to a new environment, but honestly — I personally never truly got over it.

Furthermore, I think “coping and trying to survive” is the more accurate phrase than “adjusting and fitting in”. To me the problems surged more whenever I returned to my own country. At each homecoming, I usually suffered from a reverse culture shock and perpetual homesickness for the previous countries I had lived in.

Relocating tended to generate feelings of loss, insecurity, and instability in me. Again, from what I’ve observed, I’m certain that this applies to other TCKs. The last time I underwent repatriation, I experienced stress. I was afraid, anxious and nervous. I thought it strange to be part of the ethnic majority. In addition to the issues above, I feel that I stand intermingled among bits and pieces of different cultures — that I’m a blend of my own root culture and other cultures of the countries I have lived in — yet I don’t know each of them fully to consider them as my own.

While in my last two years of high school, I had often wondered why our government doesn’t seem aware of problems regarding TCKs. Or perhaps it just doesn’t consider them as a serious enough matter worthy of attention. I feel that Indonesian TCKs are little understood by our society.

The fact that the government appears to be willfully ignorant of this growing issue upsets and troubles me. Aren’t TCKs representatives of our country when abroad? TCKs have been dubbed as “the prototype citizens of the future” — why then hasn’t there been any initiative to show concern?

Grace Miranda Samosir
Jakarta