Resiliency in third culture kids

Imagine a child joining up with a group of kids from the old neighborhood, where he no longer lives, but his parents still maintain a house. The group is laughing, talking with regular pre-teen banter about music, school gossip, all while using colloquialisms unfamiliar to the visiting neighbor. They were all once buddies, but this new/old kid definitely no longer fits in to the group.

Back at his new home, this child lives in a foreign country where he knows some language, but is worlds away from locals with culture and language. At school, an international school in his home away from home, this kid finally relaxes among his peers. They banter about music, school gossip, all the while using language and phrases unique to this community of students.

This is the unique and fascinating life of a “third culture kid.” During my years in Shanghai, this phenomenon interested me greatly. This particular example of a third culture kid is the child of an expatriate (one living and working in another country) who when going back on the once or twice-a-year home leave does not assimilate well with his cousins or old crowd. Their clothing trends may not match up; popular music of his home country may be unfamiliar to the third culture kid, as well as phraseology of the day.

This child may or may not be included in the “pack” of his new culture, and for many expat kids, the new culture means international school, where they do not have great opportunity to study and hang out with local kids. Especially in Asia, the American kid seldom becomes part of the culture – despite what is shown on the newest Karate Kid movie.

At the international school, students from all over the world and from a wealth of ethnic and religious backgrounds, come together to form a diverse and tightly knit “third culture,” one uniquely their own. What they are experiencing in their daily lives can be shared with so much in common by the others who all reside in pretty much the “same boat.”

An American student I tutored in Shanghai chatted with me one day about having to dodge the bicycle repair man on the sidewalk on her way to a local market to buy an ice cream bar. Her description made me laugh and I could totally picture the scene of this eighth grader walking down the sidewalk where a man set up a semi-permanent bicycle repair center in the middle of the walkway. She had to comically climb over and side step “business” to continue down the sidewalk. She continued that when she returned home to America for the summer, she could not easily share stories like these with her friends. These kids had never experienced sights of laundry dripping on city sidewalks, babies in “split pants” with no diapers, and the acrid smell of stinky tofu on a typical afternoon jaunt – not to mention the bike man.

The high school son of one of my American friends ran with a group of buddies from the international school who loved to feast on noodles from a street vender. He delighted as the boys called him “mien ren” (noodle man), a title the boys concocted.

I think back to last spring when I was teaching 10th grade back in Tennessee. Roger still lived in China and I tried to explain the short-lived fad of kids singing “pants on the ground,” a spin off from an American Idol audition. Kids were singing and imitating the song all over the school for a couple weeks until the phase passed and they all forgot about it. He could not pull up the clip on YouTube, as that site is blocked in China, and when I told him about how funny the kids were singing the song, it just sounded ridiculous to him. He and I are certainly of the same culture, but we were not sharing the same cultural experiences. I no longer lived in China, so when he expressed frustration at difficulty in communicating with a taxi driver, I had all but forgotten that feeling of helplessness and vulnerability.

I admire the strength and resiliency in third culture kids who create their own cultures of like-minded peers, where they live, work and play who are not only empathetic to their challenges, but are living them out in their own lives. Adaptability is one of the hallmarks of resiliency and my hat is off to this trait in third culture kids.