“Where do you live?” an acquaintance at my workplace asks. Normal question. People ask that surprisingly often. We are talking about work, city facilities, the high schoolers who spend afternoons here, and the wild disasters that follow in the kids’ wake.
“Up in Mary Hill.” I gesture vaguely in the direction of my neighborhood, as if that ever helped anyone with their sense of local geography.
“So you must’ve gone to Riverside?” He means the nearby high school.
“Uhh … no …” I stop. l can feel the wheels in my head turning faster, calculating how to explain this in the least words possible. “I was homeschooled –”
“Homeschooled.” I get the sense that he’d be ready to derail the conversation at this station, but that’s not the main point I am trying to make so I don’t let his surprise interrupt me.
“– and I’ve only been here six years anyway.”
It follows. That familiar question many TCKs dread, but I rather relish. Instantaneous, curious face, slight eyebrow raise. “Where are you from?” He asks so quickly, it’s just the natural next question for him. He’s got no idea what’s about to hit him.
“I –” How do I put this? “I’ve lived in different provinces but I was born in Finland –”
“So you’re Finnish?” If there were italics in speech, that word was definitely in italics. Some mix of fascination and disbelief and intrigue.
I calmly finish my sentence, which would have explained everything already had he waited a second. “Half. I’m half Chinese.”
“Yes, you do have a Finnish accent!” he confirms and goes on to explain with a rather endearing amount of interest how he’d noticed it before and that it bears some resemblance to South African accents. And that I did indeed look half Asian. You know. The way people are when they have been observing and guessing and then discover that their observing and guessing was, in fact, correct.
Then he tells me about himself.
“As for me, I was born here, raised here, went to school here …,” he concludes with half a laugh, as if realizing in that very moment that there’s not so much to tell about the 24 years of his local life.
Involuntarily, the tiny voice in the back of my head that makes unsolicited comments responds: That’s rather boring.
I have this pile of journals dating back to when I was nine. I rarely read them. Too much work. Too much text. Too much cringe. But occasionally, I need to get into younger me’s head to understand my childhood experiences and way of thinking. This week is one such occasion. I’m trying to find any reference to my third-culture-kid experience so I can better understand how it affected me.
I read an interesting entry from when I was 10. My father had been thinking of buying a house, apparently. I was decidedly against it. “I want to keep moving. I don’t want to stay in one place. It’s so boring. I don’t want to be like everyone else. I want to be different. I want to be unique.”
I laugh ruefully. Younger me had no idea what she was saying. Not her fault, of course. Moving was the most exciting thing that happened in life. To her, it was adventure, it was travel, it was following God. Moving was a sliver of those experiences that she had read in her favorite books.
But for some reason, she just had to compare herself to other people. She didn’t want to be like them. She wanted to be cooler.
Perhaps this idea that nomadic-life-is-the-best-life was the result of social isolation, of not being exposed to other people’s way of life enough to realize that theirs was also good – to realize that living in one place could also be exciting.
Maybe the feeling stemmed from living too much in the realm of books, particularly missionary biographies, which internalized my idea that people who adventured in the wild, traveled to foreign countries based on God’s leading, and welcomed the unexpected had the highest possible calling.
Or it could’ve been that the sentiment was just a matter of my age – being too young to realize that people can want and like different things. It takes time to grow into that understanding.
But for whatever reason, I interpreted my TCK differentness as better.
It was three years ago when I started learning about TCKs.
A newfound writer friend of mine introduced me to the term after hearing about my background. “Wait … so you’re a TCK like me!”
A quick search yielded results: People who were raised in a culture other than their parents’ culture or the culture of their passport country…
Oh.
That voice in the back of my head reacted without permission. There are people like me? There’s a term for us?
… I’m not special after all.
Most people seem to be happy about discovering that there are others like them. They find understanding, support, and solidarity of shared experience. I was not half so welcoming. Oh, I was friendly. I can never have too many friends. But the experiences that these TCKs talked about seemed far removed from my life.
Lack of belonging? What’s that? Have I ever felt like I don’t belong? No. I have belonged literally every place I set foot in. Why on earth do I need to belong anywhere anyway?
Confusing identity? I never liked this identity term anyway. I know exactly who I am, I have never felt weird about it, and no one has ever made me feel weird about it. I’m a writer, an artist, and a student, and I live in Canada. I don’t even think about who I am, culturally or ethnically, unless asked.
Grief? Grief?! There’s grief?!! I love moving. I love packing and driving across the country, meeting new people and exploring new sights, settling into a new house, and that delicious stab of wanderlust every time I learn we’re going again.
Conclusion: I might be a TCK but I’m not like TCKs. I don’t struggle.
Which, of course, made me feel like I was superior to them.
Not. So. Fast.
Life – and God – hadn’t finished with this topic yet.
Rather unwittingly, I ended up spending far more time than I ever anticipated on TCK-related things. TCK articles … TCK friends … TCK books… Slowly, slowly all that information started rearranging the furniture in my head.
Did I really enjoy reading that much, or was it a form of escapism from my very mundane existence? Did I really like moving that much, or did I like the fact that I got to see people when I moved more than at any other time in my life? Am I really as generous and people-loving as I think I am, or am I just slightly traumatized from not having friends and am ridiculously clingy to anyone who comes into my radius? Is my unquenched thirst to go to school again just a strange manifestation of grief … my wanting the thing I most loved, which I left behind as a child?
Life doesn’t let anyone go unscathed.
In all my ignorance and arrogance, I didn’t yet realize that basically, we are all very similar, just differing in the particulars. We all grow up with wounds. We all struggle in some area of life. We are all flawed and we all suffer, and we all need to grow into an acceptance of that.
On top of that, I didn’t realize that whatever difficulties I had escaped, whatever scars I didn’t have, and whatever burdens hadn’t been placed upon me were not in any way because of me. There’s nothing I have or haven’t done that made me deserve an easier life, less trauma, or kinder problems. I didn’t wake up one day and decide, “I am going to have the perfect attitude toward everything.” None of the good things in my life can be credited to me.
Even if my circumstances or experiences are better in select ways (and that would be entirely subjective), it doesn’t make me any better.
I recently came across this concept in an article that made me sit up and pay attention: TCK arrogance.
“Arrogance is often insecurity by another name,” wrote one writer on A Life Overseas. “When the third culture kid feels ‘other’ they resort to coping mechanisms.” (Source)
“This ‘I am different from you’ identity is often developed to protect TCKs from unwanted feelings of insecurity or inferiority, a natural defense mechanism which comes across as arrogance.” (Source)
Often, when we think of our particular lifestyle or way of doing things as superior to another, we speak out of our own experience, our biases and prejudices, and our insecurity and arrogance, because our identity is wrapped up in it.
“… arrogance stems from deep insecurities. People who boast about themselves and put others down often mask feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. They crave validation and admiration to make up for what they lack internally.” (Source)
We have attached our worth to something external. This will usually be something external that we, and those in our social circles, think of as successful, interesting, or worth paying attention to. And insecure about who we really are, when we are confronted with differing viewpoints and experiences, we become defensive, inflating our importance by insisting on the superiority of those external experiences we so dearly cling to.
Because what if we’re – gasp – actually unlikeable?
What if we’re – God forbid – wrong?
At first I was skeptical. Insecure? Me? I’ve never felt left out, like I didn’t fit in, or like I wasn’t home. What did I have to be insecure about?
But I began to piece it together when I thought about my personality type, my other flawed tendencies, and the internal observation I’ve done over the years.
The only “common TCK struggle” I related to for a long time was relationships. Particularly friendship.
Friendships without the time and space to grow deep, hampered by distance, taught me that they don’t come freely. They must be earned. There are a hundred other people and things that will be more immediate and more important to someone than their long-distance friend whom they hear from every month or two. You will never be the default priority. You must be more interesting, more special, more worth it to compete with the priorities they have in front of them.
My insecurity was that I wouldn’t have friends if I didn’t wear all my best qualities on my sleeve.
My insecurity doesn’t manifest itself only as TCK arrogance. It also manifests in building a cool internet personality, quickly showing off my talents to new friends, overextending to help out, talking about myself more than listening and asking questions, inconveniencing myself for others rather than finding a middle ground, giving and giving and giving, and of course, my specialty: sending the most beautifully designed snail mail I can, thinking friends will be more likely to respond if they’re utterly wowed. (Although, these days I’m convinced my mail intimidates most people more than it inspires them. As one friend once said: “How can anything I send be a good enough response to that?”)
Most of my friends were monoculture kids, not TCKs. I thought my life was unique and special, so for sure they would find it cool as well. It would be a point in my favor. Something to pique their interest. A reason for them to like me more. In hindsight, it’s likely they didn’t give two cents.
However, when I came into contact with TCKs, I realized … we’re just the same. A lot of them are cooler than me. There’s nothing in my backstory that will make them like me more. In comparison to them, I’m just average. Perhaps even … boring.
On my way home after work, I take the time to debrief my best friend on my day. There’s always something interesting and entertaining to share, and I want her to get a laugh out of it.
“I told the rec center guy my unsimple life story,” I text.
“Did you learn anything about him?”
“He was born here, raised here, and is still here. Me, ‘That’s so boring.’” I don’t mean it in a bad way, but my friend is completely unimpressed.
“BORING WHAT?” she texts back, in all caps. “It’s called STABILITY. HAVING A HOME.”
I pause.
I feel a little convicted. As though a careless comment has exposed me for what hides inside. Especially because I have recently started observing tiny remarks and contemplating what they really mean.
They don’t mean much at first glance. A complaint here. An eye roll there. The second language of sarcasm.
But are such small slips just the first sign of something very real and kind of wrong that exists underneath? Are they just the beginning of a full-blown attitude, the direction my heart is starting to turn toward by default?
But it was a joke! I attempt to argue with myself. It is kind of boring to exist in one place your whole life, compared to traveling between countries and cities and seeing new places and new people. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?
How easily I tend to gloss over my flawed ways of thinking.
Sometimes you need a friend to knock sense into you. And as usual, my dear friend was right.
Why do I fall upon the word boring? Why not stable? Why not comfortable? Why not interesting? Why not beautiful?
Why not a reflection of who we are in Christ?
If you’ve been here for a while, you know we like to say that the displacement, the transience, and the mobility of TCK life is a metaphor for our spiritual pilgrimage. We are sojourners on Earth. Citizens of heaven. Waiting for the land that flows with milk and honey. We “go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion” (Ps. 84:7 ESV).
And yes, we are.
But if TCK life can be a beautiful metaphor, then so can the non-TCK life.
If our TCK experience serves to show us a spiritual reality, then, when we look at the monoculture experience, we should see God there too.
The monoculture kid has stability and permanence, as all children of God have now and forever. For “those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever” (Ps. 125:1 ESV).
Their roots go deep, allowing them to thrive in security, as ours also should. Paul explained this when writing to the church, praying: “… that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge …” (Eph. 3:17–18 ESV)
They have identity. They belong. They don’t just live, they dwell. As Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love” (John 15:9 ESV, emphasis added).
This is not to stereotype the monoculture kid; there are as many monoculture experiences as there are third culture experiences. Of course, they can and do struggle with many of the same things we do – belonging, identity, and change, just to name a few. And of course, it is possible for TCKs to be rooted, to form strong identities, and to have a sense of stability.
This is a generalized, descriptive observation – not prescriptive to anyone’s personal experience. And because we often approach others with the stereotype assumed, it’s valid to remember that we may be different from each other. And sometimes we might misunderstand each other.
But both the stereotypical TCK and monocultural experiences are worthy and have something to teach us. We learn from their experiences too, just as we know they can learn from ours.
So the next time a monoculture kid asks you, Where are you from? and says, I was born here, raised here, and still live here –
You can look at them and see that their experience, just like yours, speaks of Jesus.
TCKs for Christ: Editor, Graphic Designer, & Social Media Manager
Lisa Elis
is TCKs for Christ’s graphic designer and resident avocado. She’s half European, half Asian, and currently lives in Canada. Enthusiastic about all literary and artistic things, she spends her time blogging, editing, drawing, and expanding her creative horizons. See her work on lisellie.carrd.co.
(She designed TCKs for Christ’s cool stamp logo.)
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