Third
Culture
Kids
Shake hands, swap
smiles. Cue supposed
small-talk. Then that hair-
raising, tummy-twisting
query that makes others hold their heads high, while I’d prefer to vanquish into the woodwork, “Where are you from?” Certainly not a complex question, often a one word answer, and yet for me and other Third Culture Kids this question, unassuming in its very aura, arouses anxiety and in Ndéla Faye’s case, provokes panic, it's the question that begs other questions, does the question refer to my nationality, birthplace, residence, or parent’s? Should I give you the nut-shell version or the nuanced dissertation? For where we are from, is primarily associated with people versus places. Our propensity to provide a messy answer to a simple inquest, ostracizes us from society while sealing our alliance to each other. Our shared eccentricity of being from everywhere and yet from nowhere, is ultimately what underscores our experience as Third Culture Kids.
What precisely is a Third Culture Kid? Coined by sociologist/anthropologist Dr. Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s, Third Culture Kid (TCK) was defined as a person who has spent a substantial portion of their formative years outside their parents’ culture. In other words, they are neither fully part of their parents’ culture (1st culture) nor fully part of the culture of the host country (2nd culture). Rather, they inhabit a ‘third culture,’ a composite culture particular to expatriates or diasporas. Subsequently, they form relationships with all the cultures they interact with, without having full ownership of any. Dr. Useem’s research “reconciled competing senses of community,” defining a demographic that defied definition. Typically, TCKs are children of immigrant families, missionaries, diplomats, military personnel, employees of international companies, and refugees.
I was born in India, but grew up in Belgium, England, Kenya, and America, I am from all of these places and yet none of these places, this paradox is puzzling, perhap aggravating to everyone except global citizens. In every place I inhabited, I was the forever foreigner, the perennial outlier, I didn’t see my story being reflected in entertainment or political life, until the election of Barack Obama. Like every other TCK, the first time I read Obama’s memoir, I got goosebumps, there was a resonance that resists articulation. He too was a global citizen. He too had felt invisible. As lucidly expressed by Ryu Spaeth, there was this sense of “being both the reader and being read,” this idea that somehow, Obama and I shared some “secret.”