Temporary TCKid Home

and most of the times it’s at stupid hours of the morning.  In this case 3am.  Panic is setting in.  I’ve had two wonderful years at university, met so many fantastic people who have been so good to me.  Including my boyfriend (of 14 months), and I’ve had the best two years of my life but it’s all being up rooted again.  My plans for my year abroad in Montpellier are in full swing and it’s giving me such anxieties.  Having to find storage for my things in Cardiff is upsetting and realizing that I will be living in an apartment on my own in France is equally killing me.

 

I know the year abroad is going to be worth it and that I will have the best experience of my life, but I’m so sick of being a nomad again after these two great years, just when I felt I got my feet to stand still and settle it’s off again.

 

I don’t think it’s ever going to stop, the traveling and the constant need to be somewhere else but never being totally and utterly happy in one place.  I’ve seen so many places and met so many fantastic people and it looks like I’ve led a charmed life, but it’s cost me a lot of my personal happiness and identity. I don’t want it to sound like a sob story but it is just so so difficult to make sense of everything.

 

 

Tram wires cross Melbourne skies

Cut my red heart in two

My knuckles bleed down Johnston Street

on a door that shouldn’t be in front of me

 

12,000 miles away from your smile

I’m 12,000 miles away from me

Standing on the corner of Brunswick

Got the rain coming down and mascara on my cheek

 

Oh whisper me words in the shape of a bay

Shelter my love from the wind and the waves

 

Crow fly, be my alibi

and return this fable on your wings
Take it far away to where Gypsies play
Beneath metal stars by the bridge

 

Oh write me a beacon so I know the way

guide my love through night and through day

 

Only the sunset knows my blind desire for the fleeting

Only the moon understands the beauty of love

When held by a hand like the aura of nostalgia

 

Whenever I listen to this, I always feel like I’m going to cry and become really sentimental, even though I’ve never been to Melbourne.  I feel the same way when I listen to the Lily Marlene by Marlene Dietrich.

http://wp.me/pFwyw-bJ

“The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.” – Chuck Palahniuk. Source: Closing remarks made on an eClass forum (Barnes & Noble University), December 5, 2004.

http://wp.me/pFwyw-bC

I am the typical cultural fruit salad of a Tckid–Mother Japanese, Father American, spoke Japanese before I learned English; born in California, went to school in Japan, studied English; moved to States, studied Japanese. Brother born in Japan. Iranian boyfriend. Have lived in the UK for 15 years, in Scotland and Southern England near London. Have two passports – American and British.

 

Other half is British. Own houses near London, and in Muscat, Oman. Learning Arabic. Love the Middle East. Other half loves the sound of the Muezzin, even though our neighbours (Palestinian!) hate the sound!

 

I could never just live in one country or one culture. I crave the East–the West is not enough. I love Islamic architecture, the desert, the souks, the sea and mountains and forts of Oman.

 

We are very fortunate that we both have senior jobs at technology companies that allow us to work from anywhere. And, to top it off, my other half works for a Japanese company. I have come full circle!

 

My Jordanian neigbour and I both love to bake, and we are always sharing recipes – though not always from our passport countries….

As I have reflected on my experience as a Third Culture Kid and heard from others with similar backgrounds, it is clear that many of us face a common internal conflict. It is the confrontation between visible deficits and invisible skills. So glaring are the deficits that casual passers-by will notice.  Added to this is the fact that my appearance doesn’t differ from many around me, I’m an invisible immigrant, so I am not given grace in my significant knowledge deficit. “You look the same – therefore You should think, respond, and know the same” is the unspoken mantra.  No one looking at me guesses the turmoil and the cross-cultural “code-switching” going on in my brain and heart.

Not knowing how to use an ATM card, facing paralysis at a drive-through and in the cereal aisle of grocery stores, confusing idioms, inability to order at a restaurant, being overwhelmed by the simple task of pumping gas, trying to keep up with pop culture, not knowing any of the answers to most of the categories in Trivial Pursuit, confused at the “15 items and under” line in a store, and not getting my license until I was well past the legal age of driving are a few of the many things that I have experienced.

What makes this more difficult is that all the skills that I used daily in the countries I call home (and others call foreign) are no longer useful. Instead they have become invisible parts of me, parts that may never need to be used again.  No one bargains for Granny Smith apples at the local grocery store  – believe me, I’ve tried! The memories of the skill with which I navigated life overseas are juxtaposed against these feelings of inadequacy and it is difficult to reconcile the two or to believe that I will ever become secure and confident in my new world.

Memories of those skills  include such things as:

• Knowing how to knead bread, make mustard, can pickles and jell jelly
• Finding where Legos can be purchased in a country that has none
• Adapting chocolate chip cookie recipes to taste good without brown sugar or chocolate chips
• Understanding idioms in Arabic,(or Urdu, or Swahili, or Russian or you fill in the blank)  and having native speakers understand
• Being completely comfortable in crowded bazaars and navigating every major airport in the world
• Adapting orange/cranberry salad to taste good with just oranges
• Experiencing significant government bureaucracy that challenges the most experienced expatriate and still loving my adopted homeland
• Surviving military take-overs, regional wars, and riots in the neighborhood
• Identifying who of my friends has commissary privileges and making sure they are invited to dinner (knowing that next time I see them there will be cranberries for my salad.)

More significant is that  no matter how mundane these skills seem, they come with a story complete with characters, plot, conflict, and resolution.  If I can see the visible deficits as part of the next chapter I may be willing to continue the narrative.

There are times when I long to take those around me to MY country and place of comfort and have our roles reversed so that I am the one helping them with sidelong glances of pity. Giving them grace instead of the other way around.  At this point I console myself with stories and memories understanding that invisible doesn’t mean absent.

Related Articles:

• At Home Abroad/Third Culture Kids

This is a blog post I wrote a while back and thought it may resonate. Another I am linking is called “Paralysis in the Cereal Aisle’ and‘Identity Theft’

Would love to hear from others and their experiences. 

Marilyn Gardner

http://communicatingacrossboundariesblog.com/

 

this is a video/movie about TCKs. please enjoy.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FouOIB_AAfw&feature=player

 

PS: this video made me lern some things about TCKs 😉

The City

I’m currently at Families in Global Transition Conference 2011 and live tweeting. Follow me @ahdancecompany and #FIGTConf – join the discussion of TCKs, TCK researchers, Expats!

 

Will blog about it on the Chameleon blog: http://tckcckahdanceproject.blogspot.com