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Languages – those we’ve loved, and lost.
Language is one of our identity props, something I’ve written about before here, with Goffman as instigator of the concept. An identity prop is a “thing” – be that behavioural habit, physical object or personal characteristic, skill set or yes, language – that helps us communicate an identity more coherently. For example, if I am playing Hamlet on stage, at some point it’d help to have a skull to hand for the famous “Alas poor Yorick” scene that the play is known for. If I am trying to communicate that I’m “not from around here” and that I feel culturally French, it’d help if I had some identity props to hand to back up my claim. I need French books in my home, skills at French cuisine, some knowledge of France the country, and yes, some French language skills. After all, who grows up and spends part of their time in France and comes away without French?! Well, lots of us.
“Misunderstood” Reviewed
Misunderstood is the latest addition to an ever-growing field of Third Culture Kid literature. I bought it hot off the press and was excited by it’s grounding in both experience and research – a solid combination. Crossman incorporates 220 interviews with TCKs under 30, 50 interviews with TCKs aged 30-60 and a survey of 744 TCKs – an enviable data set indeed (p.xxviii). Misunderstood is well written, and sympathetically expresses the TCK experiences in all its myriad expressions. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in equipping themselves to understand and care for TCKs. After all, “this book is about stories” (p. xxvii) and storytelling “helps a TCK move from feeling isolated and misunderstood to connection” (p. 302).
Coming Home
A client recently sent me a link to Sigma and Rita Ora’s “Coming Home”. This song managed to express the inexpressible, the longing for a home that has never been known. The lyrics, “there’s a life I always knew but never had”, are some of the most poignant I have ever come across.
Hearing your story – when a tree falls…
If a tree falls in the forest, but there is no-one to hear it fall, does it make a sound? Our stories need to be heard, to feel real. For us to feel real. For the less geographically challenged (!) the people they grow up with, spend years around, become witnesses to their lives. Their shared experiences reaches across all the senses to act as proofs to the stories that make up their lives.
“Can I check for strawberries, Mummy?”
Almost every day my daughter repeats the refrain, ‘Can I check if there are any more strawberries, Mummy?’ We have about four small plants that are producing about one berry every three days, and yet she hold out so much hope for them. I’ve promised her that I’ll get more plants next year, so she can get that bit closer to a bowlful 🙂 Yet her hope that something small and sweet will emerge to brighten her day is precious.
Third Culture Kids: Calculating Friendship
The biggest gift we can give ourselves as Third Culture Kids, is to dispense with the myth that ‘real’ friendships will ‘just happen’. While our membership to community is no longer automatic, we can build it. We can prioritize it, be intentional about it, and yes, be calculating about it.
3 Things I Believe as a Third Culture Kid (Yes, I’m jumping on the bandwagon!)
In 2009, Tarak Mclain was interviewed by the NPR radio station for their ‘This I believe’ series. In it, he reads a list of 30 things he believes, pulled from a full list of 100 he constructed as a six-year-old. It’s worth a listen. Humbling, is one word that springs to mind. My favourite from his list?
“I believe we can make peace”. More recently, Frigerio and Roberts, mentor and protegée with Sea Change Mentoring, wrote a blog post entitled, ’15 things I believe (as a Third Culture Kid)’, inspired by Tarak’s original piece. And so, they inspired me. Though I’ve abridged my list to just three.
Third Culture Kids: Allegiance to the Flag(s)
For many of the TCKs I have interviewed and now work with, the issue of national identity and belonging remains a source of bafflement. How can we experience passport allegiance whilst still acknowledging the multiple cultural influences on our lives? How can we reconcile ourselves with our passport identities when perhaps we feel more allegiance to another’s flag?
When the Third Culture Kid cap just won’t fit…
What does a Third Culture Kid look like? I have written a little on this in the post ‘You Cannot Fail at Your Identity’, and ‘Third Culture Kid: a nonsense label?’ but I want to look at another aspect of this here, Race. Mary Bassey writes in her article, The Third Culture Kid Article I Wish I Had Read, about her navigation of the Third Culture identity as a Nigerian TCK, both her relief and elation at finding the label and then her increasing discomfort as she realised that even in the TCK world of fluid identity and blurred boundaries, there was a mould she wasn’t fitting.
Third Culture Kids – a nonsense label?
I recently came across an article on the Wall Street Journal blog that caught my eye. It was called, Please Don’t Call My Child a Third Culture Kid and in it the author lays out her objections to the ‘label’ often attributed to her young daughter. However, in an age of increasingly fluid identities, we need not disparage a ‘label’ simply because it does not seem to meet our needs.