because i'm young

Lately I’ve been reading “Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds” by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken and have found it’s the most precise description of what moving has been like for me. As this is a big part of my life, I want to share this so everyone can understand why I am the way I am. 

This section is about the “reentry” process for Third Culture Kids returning back to the passport country from a foreign country. 

“There are also some very particular and additional stresses TCKs face during this transition to their home culture, however, and they are worth examining carefully.  One of the most basic, but unrecognized, reason for reentry stress has to do with unconscious expectations of both the TCKs and those in their home culture. As you remember, we talked earlier about the TCKs’ various relational patterns with their surrounding community and used the following model to identify each one. The foreigner: looks different, thinks different. The hidden immigrant: looks alike, thinks different. The adopted: looks different, thinks alike. The mirror: looks alike, thinks alike. As we mentioned in chapter 3, traditionally most TCK have been recognized as foreigners while they were living in their host culture. Some have lived there as hidden immigrants, and a few fit into either the adopted or mirror category. When TCKs return to their passport culture, however, almost all are hidden immigrants. Now everything Dr. Kohls talks about in his model of the iceberg and how that relates to cultural expectations and stress starts to make even more sense. People at home take one look at these returning TCKs and expect them to be in the “mirror” box - persons who think and look like themselves. Why wouldn’t they? After all, these TCKs are from the same racial, ethnic, and national background as those “at home” are.   TCKs look around them and they, too, often expect to be in the mirror box. For years they’ve known they were ‘different’ but excused it because they knew they were Asians living in England, Africans living in Germany, or Canadians living in Bolivia. That justification for being different is now gone, and they presume they will finally be the same as others; after all, these are their own people. Wrong. Take another look at Krista and Nicola, our look-alike TCKs who let their host culture peers in England and Scotland know how eager they were to return to their home countries where they knew they would finally fit in and belong.  ‘When Krista first returned to the States, she felt euphoric at finally being ‘home.’ It didn’t take long, however, before Krista realized, to her horror, that she couldn’t relate to her American classmates either. Somehow she was as different from them as from her English peers. The same thing happened to Nicola when she returned to England. After literally kissing the tarmac when she disembarked from the plane in London, a strange thing soon happened. Nicola found herself increasingly irritated with her English student peers. Their world seemed so small. Internally, she began resisting becoming like them, and within a year, virtually all of her friends were international students and other TCKs. She wondered why she could never completely fit into the world around her, whether it was Scottish or English. Both Krista and Nicola’s disappointment was greater because they had always presumed if they could only make it ‘home,’ they would no longer feel so different from others.’ Many TCKs have similar experiences to those of Krista and Nicola, where all seems well at the beginning of reentry. Relatives and old friends welcome the TCKs warmly, while the school bends over backward in its efforts to assess how transcripts from some exotic foreign school relate to the local curriculum. Soon, however, unexpected differences begin to pop up. Classmates use slang or idioms that mean nothing to the returning TCKs. Everyone else is driving a car; they only know how to ride a bike. Friends, relatives, and classmates are shocked at the TCKs’ ignorance of the most common practices necessary for everyday living. If they were true immigrants, no one would expect them to know all these things, but because they are presumed to be in the mirror box, those in the home country begin to peg them as ‘strange’ or, at least, slightly stupid. Conversely, TCKs aren’t doing much better in their opinions of new-found peers. When they saw themselves as true foreigners in Romania, they never expected their local friends to know where Utah was on the U.S. map. Now they can’t believe how dumb their friends in Utah are because they have no idea where Romania is.  Reentry might not be quite as difficult if the unexpected differences were merely in some of these more obvious ways. But deeper levels of cultural dissonance lurk beneath the apparently similar surface. Every time someone takes them to McDonald’s for a hamburger, the TCKs mention how many people could eat for a whole week back in their host country for the money this one meal costs. Even worse, they watch how much food people throw out and express their shock and horror. The person who bought their hamburger sees the TCKs as ungrateful at best, condemning at worst. The face is that while TCKs and their peers at home may indeed look exactly alike, they don’t share a common worldview because their life experiences have been totally different.  And so the problems continue to mount. TCKs who have grown up in a culture where the commitment to honesty and respect is accompanied by orderliness and quiet find entry into a confrontational, loud, self-centered home culture quite offensive. Those who have grown up in a boisterous, activity-centered, individualistic culture may find people from their own country docile and self-effacing. Often TCKs begin to realize they don’t even like what is considered their home culture. And those in the home culture may soon realize they’re not so sure they like the TCKS either. But no one stops to think through how these reactions are related to the cultural expectations they had for one another in the first place. They still presume their insides match as well as their outsides and that something is ‘wrong’ with the other person.” 

I know that was unbearably long, but I appreciate those who read it to the end. My whole life I have never been able to put my experiences into words but this book did exactly that. I highly recommend it for any other TCKs out there!