Third Culture Kids

I know I spend a lot of time talking about my observations of our host countries and my own experiences abroad, but I'm sure a lot of you are wondering, "How about the kids? She hardly ever talks about the kids!" Well, fear not, they are doing fine. But I thought I would expound on that a little since they are what some experts define as "Third Culture Kids", meaning they are being raised in a culture different than the one in which their parents were raised.

I remember back in Madrid a couple of years ago, I was sitting in one of those boring school orientation meetings and the principal recommended we all read a book called "Raising Global Nomads". "Because that's what you are all doing," she said, "You are raising global nomads." And I thought to myself, "No I'm not - we are doing one little stint here in Spain and then it's back home forever." So I certainly did not need any stinking books.

Well, here we are on our second assignment (and third continent) so I guess I can no longer deny that our lives are a bit out of the ordinary. Mostly they are very normal American kids - they have playdates and sleep-overs, they ride their bikes, go to Cub Scouts, watch cartoons. Yet every once in a while there are these moments, which are both strange and cool, when I realize they are not completely normal.

Sometimes it is something the kids say - and not what they say, but how they say it. It is not so unusual for Ian to make a sentence mixing 2 or 3 different languages. Since they are just starting to learn Chinese, he'll start out in Chinese, and when he hits a word he doesn't know, he'll say it in Spanish. We have some very surreal dinner conversations.

Tim has been somewhat resistent to learning other languages, so in his case he is influenced by the foreign English speakers, the British and Australians. He uses words like "quite", "indeed", and "properly" a little too often for a 6 year old. I hope it doesn't get him beat up back in the States.

Then there's the TV. Back in Spain, they were always walking around quoting their favorite Spanish commercials and here in Shanghai, for some reason Tim gets really annoyed with all the travel ads on CNN ("Not Malaysia again!"). Here we get a satellite feed out of the Philippines which has tons of US programming (more than we had in Spain, even) so they are watching a lot of the same cartoons they would watch in the States. But I had to laugh when, back in October, in between episodes of SpongeBob and Fairly Odd Parents, Nickolodean ran a segment called "How to Survive Ramadan" with the tagline "It's cool to fast!".

We constantly tell the kids that this is not a normal life and how very lucky and priviledged we are to have this experience. I do try to keep it real. I don't have a housekeeper like virtually all of the other expats do. The boys have to do chores and homework like we all had to do growing up. Then one day we were giving a ride home to Timmy's best friend (the most adorable little Japanese boy), who says something like, "If we had a race, my driver could beat your driver!" I had a sudden urge to go home and make them scrub toilets.

There are definitely times where I have to just give in to the fact that no matter what I do, these kids are being raised in a different environment that I was and there is only so much you can do - especially when they start to know more than you do. I make Ian present his homework to me every night to be checked. I was doing okay with the Chinese homework because I have been taking classes, too, and Ian usually just has to do some translation or draw pictures. Until one night when I look in the workbook to see an entire paragraph of just Chinese characters. I immediately closed the book, handed it back, and said "Looks good to me."

Although they are doing well and seem perfectly happy and well-adjusted, they are well aware that this is only temporary and they do look forward to being settled somewhere. Ian defintely wants to be back in America with family and our own house. I think Tim just wants to live any place where they only speak English and you get enough snow "to make a proper snowman" in the winter. I only hope that in the years to come when this is all a distant memory, they look back on this time and remember it fondly. By the way, I never did read that book.