Normally it has to do with the location that they associate most with. For example, when I meet a recruit at work, I typically ask them where they are from, and where they go to school. The answer to that question provides me with information about that person, what city, state, and country they are from. Often we also associate ourselves with our religion, our profession, and our hobbies. If someone is talking to me about my work environment and they ask "What are you?" I typically tell them I am an athletic trainer. If I am talking about faith I typically tell them that I am a nondenominational Christian.
After I moved back to the United States when I was 15, I really struggled with these labels. I didn't know where I fit in. Growing up in the middle east, when someone asked me where I was from, I typically told them the United States, if they wanted more information than that, I told them Massachusetts. After all, I was born just outside of Boston and I spent my first 18 months on Cape Cod. I spoke English with an American accent. I was typically dressed in conservative American clothing. I at American food at home. When I moved back to the United States I realized that it wasn't a good label for myself. I didn't identify with so many of the markers that point towards being from either the United States or Massachusetts. I didn't and still don't understand most of American pop culture. This week one of my coworkers asked me if I thought it was sad that Ed McMahon died. Honestly, I have NO IDEA who Ed McMahon is. I didn't grow up watching American television, no smurf, no Cosby family, none of that. Many of my friends have posted on their facebook walls about how sad they are about the passing of Michael Jackson. Honestly, I didn't grow up idolizing him, he didn't influence me as a young child. In fact the only recollection I have of him was a poster of him with a leopard or some other large cat in the tube in London. By the time I had moved back to the United States, Michael Jackson was just weird and people were concerned with his sanity. I don't know how to eat a whole lobster by myself, I can do it and I like it, but I have to be coached through it. I didn't know what whoopi pies were till I was in college, I have never called a water fountain a bubblah, and though I ride the T occasionally, I don't have the stops on the red or the green or the orange line memorized. Oh and "wicked" is not part of vernacular on a sentence by sentence basis. I grew up thinking this was normal.
A third culture kid is someone who spent many of their formative years living in a culture different from their passport country/their parents' culture. The individual child blends the two cultures to create their own. Barack Obama is considered a third culture kid, so is Angie Smith, I don't know her personally but there is a link to her blog over on the right. I share my third culture with my brothers and the other American kids I grew up and I share my third culturedness with thousands of people around the world.
There are so many reasons that I am grateful to be a third culture kid. I am grateful for the opportunity I had growing up to see so much of the world. I am thankful for the opportunity to see the church functioning outside the cultural confines that we have here in the United States. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn about so many different cultures and places because I grew up in an international community.
There are also some very real and very hard struggles I have had to deal with. I have had to adjust to rarely feeling like I truly belong. This morning I listened to a radio interview with a third culture kid expert and two third culture kids. I listened as they describe their struggles, the process of grieving the loss of moving back to their home country. The every day struggles to fit in. When I was in graduate school I finally did a lot of this, processed a lot of this, grieved the loss. It was important for me to do. It was hard. I made a commitment at that time to be me, fully me, to not hide. I committed to not taking on labels that don't apply to me. This is still very hard. It is perplexing at times to some people. Some people struggle when they can't put me in a box. For example, in college I was an international student, but not an international student so I had to write this letter and petition a committee to have my foreign culture credit requirement waived. All true international students don't have to do that, and normal American students can't have it waived, but me, well I was just weird. September 11 was incredibly weird day for me. My parents where still living in the Middle East, we were used to calling them after bombings to make sure they were okay, for the first time, they were calling us since we all lived on the east coast. My younger brother was in boarding school and just miles from the crash site in Pennsylvania where the plane went down. The copilot of the first plane to fly into the World Trade Center went to my church, and my older brother was working round the clock as a fire fighter paramedic so that his coworkers could go to New York city to help, just a few hours away. It was the total reverse of the way life had been for the previous 19 years. America had been the place we were evacuated to during war, then all of a sudden it seemed like Saudi Arabia was the safe haven. Weird.
My friend is just now starting this process. I am proud of her for finally admitting that she doesn't know who she is or where she belongs. I know that it's a long road ahead of her, I know because I've been down it, and am still going down it. I am thankful that it is becoming second nature for me to explain that I grew up overseas instead of making up a quick answer, like that I am from Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, or Pennsylvania, or Michigan. People don't look at you weird and have 17 more questions when you just rattle off one of those states. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever get married, though I desire it, because my identity is so complex. The thought of marrying someone who isn't an adventuresome eater, who doesn't like to travel, who doesn't have a passport freaks me out. I wonder if it will freak my future husband out when on a whim I decide to mix up some henna and dye my hands red. Or when I refuse to eat American hummus and insist on making my own. Or when I tell him that I think Leila would be a way better name for our daughter then Lara or Laura or whatever. Or when I freak out in a grocery store because they have bounty, mars bars, or miranda. Or how about when I inform him that I only like beaches that look like this.
Of course this is all hypothetical, because I don't have a husband, but none the less, things that I think about, wonder how one earth God is going to work this all out. Ultimately, the label I care about most, the only one that really matters is that I am a child of the Living God, I wonder what people would say if I just told them that when they asked where I am from.
