An unknown minority

which is actually a pretty big one

Skin tones? All of them.

Eye colour? All of them.

Global? Totally.

Would you notice us walking down the street? Probably not.

Who are we?

A name was coined for us back in the 1950s by a North American sociologist/anthropologist, her name was Ruth Unseem. In Japan, they tend to prefer the term ‘kikokushijo’ (海外子女).

Some of you have undoubtedly already clocked who I’m talking about but I’ll carry on with the teaser :-)

Is this minority talked about in the media? Not really, there was an article published on the BBC news website in 2016 (link below).

Have any studies been done? Yes, quite a few (links below).

Do all the people in this group know that they belong to this group? No, probably not. I certainly didn’t.

Personally

As a child and a young teenager, I always felt a bit adrift and not quite on the same wavelength as many of my peers. There were some subjects of discussion that I simply couldn’t relate to. This carried on into my adulthood. Around the age of 12, I started to read stuff that was ‘not normal’ for someone that young. Philosophy, political writings, and suchlike. I remember being teased when my school peers caught me reading ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ by Engels.

I was searching for something and what I was looking for was a way to understand why the human world just seemed very strange and full of things that I couldn’t get my head around at all. As an adult my quest continued and I started reading up on psychology, anthropology, and anything that might give me a clue.

Finally, after years of thinking that there must be something wrong with me I stumbled across the writings of Ruth Unseem, Rieko Fry, and Kano Podolsky. Thanks to them I came to understand why I felt and had thought and felt differently to my school peers and then my adult peers. It also explained why certain schoolmates were friends and others not so much.

Third-culture kids and adult third-culture kids

In 2009 the U.S Internal Revenue Service estimated that there were around 7 million US citizens living ‘abroad’. In 2006, The Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain estimated that 5.5 million British citizens lived abroad around 9.2% of the UK population. We don’t have any figures for the global population but there are a lot of people who live and work away from their country of origin. These people have children and it’s they that are referred to as third-culture kids (TCK), when they grow up they are referred to as adult third-culture kids (ATCK).

It’s quite simple, your parents come from one culture, you live in another (or several others over time). You then create, for yourself, a so-called third culture that has some elements from the first two but also many aspects unique to your personal third culture.

What are the characteristics of TPKs and ATPKs?

They got taken to or were born into, a culture different from that of their parents BEFORE they had developed a cultural identity based on their parent’s country of origin.

The questions “where do I come from” and “where do I belong?” is one that tends to preoccupy us.

We tend, for better or for worse, to be quite family-orientated as the family tends to be the only stable relationship.

As children, we work to be accepted where we are placed and then we are moved on, this can be difficult and means having to deal with grief and loss.

Moving back to one’s parents’ culture can give a sensation of being a hidden immigrant. We haven’t grown up with many of the cultural references and norms of our parent’s country.

We tend to be less emotionally stable than mono-cultural people and depression is more prevalent in the ATCK population.

On the positive side:

We tend to be at least bilingual if not multi-lingual.

We tend to feel at home in most cultures and are able to quickly adapt to a new one.

We tend to have an expanded worldview, one which is the opposite of parochial. This means we tend to view the world differently and perhaps most importantly, we have an enhanced capacity to understand different points of view. This means that we tend to be more tolerant of ‘differences’, cultural, of people with different backgrounds, etc and, in general, be less prejudiced than monocultural people.

We tend to be less authoritarian than mono-cultural people.

We don’t tend to be very ethnocentric, if at all, and have difficulty understanding things like nationalism, and racism. Sexism is global, so while it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand, we will have encountered it in our different host countries.

Back to me

My mini existential wobbles as a pre-teen, teenager and then adult are easily explained by the TCK hypothesis. It also explains why I have never been able to understand nationalism nor racism, they make no sense to me. The lack of a fixed cultural point has also meant that I have no way of understanding why we don’t learn more from each other across national boundaries. In fact, I don’t really understand why we have national boundaries.

It also helps explain my garden aesthetic which is a mix of Japanese style and English cottage garden style, two forms that are a challenge to put together! It does explain why I’ve got a shishi odushi that fills an old cast iron bathtub!

I’ve got tools that are in fractions of an inch and in metric. Traveling in some countries seems to take a long, long time until I adjust to the roadsigns being in miles and not kilometers. Temperatures in Fahrenheit are just very scary (25°Celsius, which is nice, is 77° Fahrenheit!). I keep using the word ‘normally’ in a way that English people don’t. I have to check time zones before I telephone friends. As the people at tckidnow.com point out, I do think VISA is a document that’s stamped in my passport, not a plastic card I carry in my wallet!

I wrote this article in order to ‘spread the word’. Perhaps reading it may help someone who is the parent of a third-culture kid or is an adult third-culture kid. Finding out about it all certainly helped me better understand myself and the path in life that I adopted. Childhood and early teen experiences stay with us, they are often the foundations on which we build our lives. Appreciating how these experiences have influenced us can help us along the way.

If you are an adult third-party kid or the parent of one, perhaps you would like to share this article around your network. Perhaps the information will be helpful to someone you know.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161117-third-culture-kids-citizens-of-everywhere-and-nowhere

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0147176712000971

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656609001299

http://www.tckworld.com/useem/home.html