Image: web.ash.nl
“I’ve lived in 7 different countries growing up: Saudi, Kenya, Germany, Switzerland, the US… ,” says a 14 year old girl wearing Ugg boots and a brand-hoodie sat across from 14 year old me on my first day at my international school. Impressive, I thought at the time. I imagined she must have seen a lot of far-away places, must know a lot about other cultural norms and perhaps even speak a several languages. I later discovered that this girl spoke only English and had grown up inside gated communities in the majority of these diverse destinations, amidst other expat families associated with the same company as her father. This wasn’t quite the ‘nomadic lifestyle’ as I’d imagined it.
In line with my effort to promote well-informed and mind-opening tourism, I think the notion of the Third Culture Kid highlights some of the pitfalls of today’s attitudes surrounding ‘travel’ and its accompanying ‘worldliness’. Travel, in pursuing these ideals (and the ideals in themselves are questionable), is not enough. Travel is moving from A to B; getting to know a new culture, ‘immersing’ oneself in a place, requires much more deliberate engagement with local cultural contexts.
The “Third Culture Kid”, or TCK, is a subculture that I have increasingly been confronted with in the latter half of my life. It’s different from a lot of cultures. It’s not like a national culture, for example, that you may have had shoved down your throat from a young age and, if anything, try to cut loose from as you grow up. For the people I’ve spoken to who consider themselves part of the TCK clan, I have heard their discovery of the term described as veritable enlightenment, marking an era of clarity – a world of explanations for the displacement and confusion experienced by these troubled souls throughout their childhoods.
In case the term is new to you, the Third Culture Kid describes a person who has “spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside their parents’ culture.”. The term was coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem after she spent several years in India with her children in the early fifties. The term captured how these children integrate aspects of their birth culture (the first culture) and the new culture (the second culture), creating a unique “third culture“.
These children’s parents usually serve in the military or work in a business requiring them to travel. Studies have been done, predominantly on so-called ‘military brats’, that reveal both the positive and negative effects of the TCK upbringing. For example, these children are 4 times as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as non TCK’s, yet 90% also feel “out of sync with their peers” (tckid.com).
myanmarbusinessnews.com
Yet the more I heard the term being used by my own peers at international school, the more I felt estranged from the TCK identity. I started to notice that it often served as go-to explanation for pretty much any feeling of confusion and teenage angst that, at its worst, became a bratty defense mechanism for evading responsibility for ignorance. A refusal to make an effort to learn the local language; an arrogance towards local norms; a total ignorance of local politics – all because they’d done it all, seen it all so many times before. It is in this sense no surprise that the term has a juvenile slant: it refers specifically to “kids”. This is a subculture often discovered and asserted during adolescence, to be referred to in the past tense when we “grow up” and come to terms with a frustrated displacement that we, hopefully later come to realise, is actually universal.
Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that every teenager seeks refuge in subcultures. Be it music, art, or other fan-cultures, we all look back on the embarrassing fashion mishaps and musical tastes on our desperate hunt for an ‘interesting’ identity. Third culture kids simply often find their calling in the experience of being spun across cultures. But the problem with any of these affiliations arises when they allow individuals to evade the general responsibilities we carry as world citizens. Being a TCK cannot act as a catch-all excuse for brattish-ness, self-entitlement, laziness, or ignorance, especially not when these are people often trumpet their nomadic background as an achievement.
Travel should urge us to discover cultures on their own terms. Image from: dutchindianblog 2015/08
I have, for example, noticed that the TCK’s self-proclaimed sense of displacement is often coupled with an ugly strain of self-righteousness. tckid.com reports for example that “90% of TCK’s report feeling as if they understand other cultures/peoples better than the average American.” In many cases this is probably true, but the sentiment needs to be supported with a conscientious attitude that never sees this knowledge as complete, or these people are in danger of becoming complacent and deluded.
In tune with the questions about self-reflexive tourism I’ve been asking throughout my posts, I have to ask: Is the Third Culture Kid really more in touch with other cultures than the antonymous ‘culturally rooted individual’?
In trying to answer this question over the years I have reached one conclusion: exposure isn’t enough. Lots of these kids have travelled a great deal but relocating, and the genuine curiosity towards other cultures that this requires, never ceases to be challenging work. The TCK is not exempt from the effort required to get to know a new place. Yet people in general, and expats in particular, have a knack for flocking to the familiar and deflecting the unknown. A weariness of moving and making new connections makes these families crave convenience; the less effort they have to put into reaching out, to building up new social networks, the better. New languages and customs become unnecessary complications, as opposed to fascinating and exciting. Expats often clump together in familiar havens that become so homogenised they could be anywhere. These kids, I found, have often grown up in worlds that are distinctly smaller and more claustrophobic than those of local children who are free to seek out connections in a much larger social network than the quarantined army brat.
Perhaps I am being overly critical of my own kind. I can’t blame families constantly on the move for seeking out a little of the familiar wherever they go. But having experienced moving and trying to integrate in a new culture, as well as resolutely sticking to familiar expat circles, I have become adamant that we give those who really travel, and make the effort to integrate, the recognition they deserve. Children who claim that they have seen more and understand more about the world’s cultures simply because they’ve relocated diminish the point of visiting new places. The aim is not to crowd your world map with as many pins as possible, it is to allow your world-view to be complicated by the new places you experience. This goal, and the goal of intelligent tourism, is available to those who make a distinct choice. This choice is never a given, not for the TCK or any tourist generally. Immersion in a new culture and a willingness to learn are ideals that we may never realize but should continue to strive for. When we abandon our self-education abroad, travel risks becoming elitist cultural appropriation, serving our own egos but definitely not mankind.
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