It’s nearly bedtime and my kids are brushing their teeth. I overhear this discussion from the bathroom:

“My friend Amelia went to another guojia (country) and she’s never coming back ever, ever.”

“Oh! Last year, my friend Fuluolong went to Faguo [France] and he said, ‘Uhm, il ne va pas revenir non plus (he’s not coming back either).”

“Maybe one day we will go away to Canada, Mommy said.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, don’t tu (spit) on my side!…”

I’m listening to this from the kitchen, and since the conversation has deteriorated into an argument, I know I’ll have to intervene any second. But as I dry my hands, my thoughts are on the uniqueness of my children’s “third culture” lives.

They are speaking in their particular combination of three languages. English is their “mother tongue,” or the language I reinforce as the Anglo Canadian, but Chinese is their surroundings and the exclusive language of their grandparents and father. They’re attending the French international school, so they sometimes bounce into a partial French sentence, which I find amusing because of their France-French lilt against my (preferred) Quebecois accent. Nevertheless, with each other, they’re in a perpetual linguistic dance.

But their lives aren’t just unique because of language. They’re living here in Beijing and, like me, they deal with the regularity of friend disappearances. They’re so used to it, it’s just a casual conversation while brushing their teeth, and I wonder at how this will impact their abilities to bond with people throughout their lives. It’s shifted my own instincts around friendship after only a decade of expat living—and not in a very positive way—so I can only hope that my children are more resilient than I’ve been.

According to TCK (third culture kid) literature, children who experience a life surrounded by the transience of ex-patriotism learn to make friends more quickly but at a lesser depth so that the inevitable disappearance of these friends hurts less. This knowledge makes me sad for them. I hope I can always model close friendship even across distance.

But as I sort out their spitting argument and hustle them into PJs and eventually bed, I’m also still thinking about how lucky they are. They’re living a life geared up to be fully proficient in the world’s two most important languages: English and Mandarin. They’re also learning French, which makes them fully proficient in the country for which they hold a passport, not to mention fairly versatile globally, as well. What’s not to champion about knowing a romance language?

But, maybe more important is the consistent exposure to multiple cultures and societies. Our frequent returns to Canada (specifically Toronto: now deemed the world’s most diverse city by BBC radio) and their daily school life in Beijing at an international school that proudly states that in 2019 they “welcome 50 nationalities,” my kids are living a life incredibly rich in humanity.

The unique upbringing of any TCKs will bring challenges, such as a difficulty finding people to relate to, perhaps, or a tendency to think from a non-conventional angle thanks to these different lenses through which they have perceived the world at these young, impressionable ages; but, these skills and sensitivities—things that are second nature to them rather than accomplishments—will certainly provide more lift than burden to their respective futures.

As I tuck my two TCKs into bed, I feel a familiar comfort: they’ll always have each other. Beijing is home now, but ultimately, “home” is where your teeth get brushed, your spitting fights happen, where your loved ones are. No specific geography required.

About the Writer

Ember Swift is a Canadian musician and writer who has been living in Beijing since late 2008. She has a daughter called Echo (国如一) and a son called Topaz or “Paz” (国世龙).

This article appeared in the beijingkids May 2019 Identity issue.
Photo: Aleksandar Pasaric via Pexeks

If you don’t have an easy answer to the question “Where are you from?” and your closest friends are from six different countries, chances are you’re a third culture kid. The term was coined by Ruth Hill Useem, an American sociologist and anthropologist in the 1950s to describe children who spend a significant portion of their lives outside of their parents’ native culture.

Hannah Smith of Harrow International School of Beijing has written a blog post on the experience of being a third culture kid in Beijing on The Guardian’s Student Blog.

She writes:

Most students at my school aren’t from one particular place. Sure, our passports might say we’re British or Malaysian, but it’s more complicated than that. Where you’re “from” is less about birthplace and more about cultural identity; as an expat student your cultural identity ends up being difficult to categorise.

Third culture kids quite often feel more connected to each other than to their parents culture or the society they live in. Theirs is an experience that only each other can understand. Research from around the world has shown that third culture kids from completely different cultures share more in common with each other than with peers from their parent’s original society.

Quote:

I feel like a foreigner everywhere I go, a sentiment echoed by other students at international schools like mine. Mixed-race students who travel a lot while growing up can lack a cultural identity and also have to struggle with the fact that they don’t have a history – or not one that’s easily explained.

Kamalabadi says: “I very much feel like a cyber-age person, with bits and pieces of my background stuck together like a montage from the things I read, movies I watch and places I’ve been.”

And while third culture kids build connections to all of the societies they are exposed to, they generally don’t feel real ownership of any.

Quote:

For me, a cultural identity is something I have to cultivate and maintain, not something that falls into place naturally. I’ve heard my accent becoming progressively more American over the last five years. This is jarring because my vaguely British accent was the last real reminder of where I was born. Without it, how am I supposed to tell people I’m from the UK?

I’ve had to make a concerted effort to retain my nondescript, regionally ambiguous “English” accent because without it, I don’t have any proof that I was from the UK at all. My passport might as well have been Taiwanese.

This lack of definition means that I’ve ended up in a murky haze of different cultures, with bits and pieces from everywhere I’ve lived and everyone I’ve met. I count with my fingers the way they do in Taiwan and I grew up eating roti in Singaporean food courts and goose fat noodles at my grandmother’s house in Kaohsiung.

The good news for parents of third culture kids is that according to Useem they are more mature as teenagers, much more likely to be linguistically adept, and four times as likely as non-third culture kids to earn a bachelors degree.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com