About Being a TCK…

It wasn’t until 2007 did I even know there was such a thing as a Third Culture Kid. I found out thanks to my older sister, and a certain Facebook group.

Third Culture Kids (known as TCK’s) are people who were raised for a large part of their formative years outside their own country or culture, and end up integrating their host countries’ cultures along with their own. TCK’s often end up having much more in common with other TCK’s (no matter where they’ve lived) than they do with their ‘own’ people.

This list sums it up very nicely. I got it off said Facebook group and I bolded the ones that apply to me.

- “Where are you from?” has more than one reasonable answer.
- You’ve said that you’re from foreign country X, and your audience has asked you which US state X is in.
- You flew before you could walk.
- You speak two languages, but can’t spell in either. (Partly true…I can only spell effortlessly in English but can write in French and Arabic—-but I struggle)
- You feel odd being in the ethnic majority.
- You have three passports.
- You have a passport but no driver’s license. (This was true for a pretty long time, hehe)
- You go into culture shock upon returning to your “home” country. (I’m so used to behaving in a more ‘westernized’ fashion that I forget that people born and bred in Lebanon don’t really understand my actions)
- Your life story uses the phrase “Then we moved to…” three (or four, or five…) times.
- You wince when people mispronounce foreign words.
- You don’t know whether to write the date as day/month/year, month/day/year, or some variation thereof.
- The best word for something is the word you learned first, regardless of the language.
- You get confused because US money isn’t color-coded.
- You think VISA is a document that’s stamped in your passport, not a plastic card you carry in your wallet.
- You own personal appliances with 3 types of plugs, know the difference between 110 and 220 volts, 50 and 60 cycle current, and realize that a trasnsformer isn’t always enough to make your appliances work.
- You fried a number of appliances during the learning process.
- You think the Pledge of Allegiance might possibly begin with “Four-score and seven years ago….”
- Half of your phone calls are unintelligible to those around you.
- You believe vehemently that football is played with a round, spotted ball.
- You consider a city 500 miles away “very close.”
- You get homesick reading National Geographic.
- You cruise the Internet looking for fonts that can support foreign alphabets.
- You think in the metric system and Celsius. (And I always will!)
- You may have learned to think in feet and miles as well, after a few years of living (and driving) in the US. (But not Fahrenheit. You will *never* learn to think in Fahrenheit). (Actually I never lived in the US, but in Canada I learned feet and miles…but, no, I won’t ever think in Fahrenheit!)
- You haggle with the checkout clerk for a lower price.
- Your minor is a foreign language you already speak.
- When asked a question in a certain language, you’ve absentmindedly responded in a different one.
- You miss the subtitles when you see the latest movie.
- You’ve gotten out of school because of monsoons, bomb threats, and/or popular demonstrations.
- You speak with authority on the subject of airline travel.
- You have frequent flyer accounts on multiple airlines. (My dad does, though)
- You constantly want to use said frequent flyer accounts to travel to new places.
- You know how to pack.
- You have the urge to move to a new country every couple of years.
- The thought of sending your (hypothetical) kids to public school scares you, while the thought of letting them fly alone doesn’t at all.
- You think that high school reunions are all but impossible.
- You have friends from 29 different countries. (Heh, I don’t think it’s that high of a number, but I do have a good number of friends from around the world)
- You sort your friends by continent. (More like countries. My Facebook friends list is sorted like that, hehe)
- You have a time zone map next to your telephone. (Not exactly, but I do count time differences in my head, especially between here and Canada)
- You realize what a small world it is, after all.

I’ll add more to this page about my experience as a TCK. Don’t know when, heh, but sometime in this lifetime.