The Personal Experience that Set the Initial Identity 

I first came across the term TCK in college, when someone much older than me made me aware of the term. I devoured all the material available, only to realize that it ticked all the boxes. Caught between this culture and the next, check. Code switching on a daily basis, double check. Not knowing where you belong because everyone has something to say and won’t let you make up your own mind, triple and quadruple check from here to eternity. I seemed to have found paradise, except that all the TCKs I was reading or hearing about had super glamorous lifestyles, growing up in exotic locations i.e. places that were far removed from where some of their relatives had grown up (snowy planes for those who grew up in warmer climates and warm(er) climates for those used to the cold, the dark and the snow). 

Meanwhile there was my experience of keeping a large part of my identity quiet (and not talking about that upon penalty of death at parental hands), and insecurities about money and residency when TCKs were talking about the swimming pools and the compounds and the help. The only thing I seemed to have in common with these Third Culture Kids was that we often felt torn about where we belonged, yet their status was due to a jetsetter lifestyle, while mine seemed to occur due to my mother’s whim of always wanting something better and never being satisfied with what was received, once it had been received. There was no glamorous job to speak of where either parents were concerned, nor were they connected to the church. In fact, since my father was Jewish and my mother Catholic, I frequently had to keep at least one part quiet when it came to discussing beliefs. Going to synagogue Friday nights and then following that up with a church service on Sunday only became funny in stories I shared when I was a grownup and was able to determine my own identity, or try developing one for myself. As a child there was a constant, very conscious, awareness of having to watch what I said and when, without being able to articulate that despite my mother’s precautions of telling our neighbors in Chicago I was attending a French school when she’d enrolled me in a Jewish school for her own profit, my little Jewish face clearly stood out in our very Polish neighborhood and gave the game away long before she could say anything. 

Third Culture Kids didn’t have those issues. They came in as a French person to whatever location they lived at and embraced their other heritage, whatever it was. And even if their other parent came from somewhere that didn’t immediately embrace the sought after WOW!, it was incorporated into their life and their story, which then became part of their identity; an identity which then became glamorous all over again. The lesson I took away from that was that once again there was no space for someone like me in the world, I could come close but it would never be the same, I would never really fit. 

What Makes a C(ross-)C(ultural) K(id)

I could have bonded with the immigrant kids or the ones who were first generation local, as I started calling them much later. But they didn’t interest me. We were too much alike, and we all wanted to fit in, which didn’t leave any space for friendships with each other. We were rivals in this game of fitting in , of presenting ourselves as local (a desire my peers seemed to embrace more than I did, which complicated matters even further), despite our parents standing out like sore thumbs. My father never sported a beard, but then again he was atheist, so religion never came into play with him other than impressing on his offspring that all religions should be respected as long as we weren’t talking about a cult. He still stood out because of the way he spoke (or didn’t) speak the language and his ways, more reminiscent of Hungary in the 1920s than anything Germany, France or even America had to offer. 

Ironically, I ended up bonding with kids in my exact same situation, we just never talked about it then. My best friend, who lived a floor below us and was one year younger, had a Polish mother and German stepfather, but his stepfather was from what was then communist Germany, a culture and value system that was closer to Poland than it was to Western Germany. I googled him when I visited my new family in Poland (more on that later), and couldn’t stop grinning at the irony of the fact that he too was fluent in Polish and had in fact married someone from Poland. We were told to keep these facts hush hush, though our mothers hung out and must have spoken Polish among themselves but reverted to German when we were around. Like mine, his parents fought viciously  too, and even though we never talked about it, we formed an unspoken bond around that which needed no further explanation other than walking up a floor, or down, to play. I knew his mother was abusive, same as he must have known mine was too, but somehow neither made the connection to ourselves. We felt for the other, and didn’t acknowledge that the reason we never mentioned it was because we were living the same story separated only by a ceiling / floor. 

The (Not So) Hidden Others

Meanwhile my friend from kindergarten told me when I became interested in my father’s heritage that her father had been Hungarian as well, which surprised me far less than her maternal grandmother’s tale of having walked to Germany as an ethnic German in Poland after the war. We were in college back then, which was a long way to go for family secrets to emerge. The other people I felt drawn to had similar backgrounds: my best friend when I was twelve had a Polish mother and Polish father but grew up identifying as German, which wasn’t that obvious when we were little. My other close friend was a Turkish boy who lived down my block, and I really wanted to get close to a mixed girl on the other end of our block, who didn’t know her father, but whose mother had a string of GI boyfriends, who were all black. And on the other side of the street, behind our backyard, was a three-family house with two American families who had decided not to live on the base but had opted for a very German neighborhood where the children of ethnic Germans who’d migrated there after WWII had decided to raise their offspring. 

I only realized many decades later that there was a huge difference between a CCK and a TCK. And that the CCK crossed cultures daily, often several times a day, while the TCK might actually get a break. At least that was my perception, because the grass really is always greener on the other side, mainly when you are questioning yourself about where you belong vs. where you might want to be. At the end we are all (Adult) Cross-cultural Kids, but how we lived and identified then and now will add an extra name on the table of identification we (can) trot out anytime to see where we fit on any given day. For myself, I would tell people interested that I grew up as a Cross-cultural Kid where one culture had to play second fiddle to another and want to live an intercultural identity, in which all cultures I identify with are equal, to myself as well as to others.