We Are Cumulus: Third Culture as a Cloud

I have had a bit of an epiphany recently regarding visualizing, defining and explaining "third culture."

It begins with the useful venn diagram designed by Ruth Van Reken, republished (with David Pollock) in Third Culture Kids (14).

In my head, this was supplemented by some theory on borderlands (eg the border between the US and Mexico), on transnationalism (about crossing borders) and about "interstices" or places between . . .

I began to understand more clearly the distinction between geographically emplaced culture and culture produced by the specific geographic displacement experienced by TCKs (which is characterized by  mobility and competing national/ cultural influences during the developmental years, paired with an expectation of repatriation upon reaching adulthood).

In some senses all three circles in Van Reken's diagram are territorial: they are like very simplified country outlines on a map.  One can see the image as, almost: Home Country, Host Country (Countries) and a Third "Country" ("Country" in scare quotes because the issue is that third culture doesn't have a specific country).

Third culture is cultural, as the term suggests.  While the first and second cultures imply place and geography as well as culture, third culture implies culture detached from a specific location.  We TCKs can share a culture because our similar experiences are about deterritorialization, not about terroir.

Naomi Hattaway's triangle is a useful addition, for it is about cultural transformation: circle country encounters square country and the result is a triangle (I oversimplify: she explains beautifully, with diagrams).  Significantly her paradigm, like Van Reken's, gives us this equation: "country one + country two = third culture."  Place plus place = something that happens that doesn't have a specific geographic location.

My epiphany is this: what if Van Reken's venn diagram is rendered three dimensionally?  Home country is a place on ground level, host countries are places on ground level and third culture is represented as floating above, like a cumulus cloud?

The venn diagram might look like two circles ( First Culture, Second Cultures) with a cloud floating above them  (Deterritorialized Third Culture).




Yeah, OK.  That looks kind of goofy, I know.  Graphic design: not my forte.

Still, I think there's something really important  to conceptualize here.  We all already know that third culture doesn't have a single location, but our diagrams perpetuate/create a third space on the terrestrial level, when it might be more apt to create a third space that floats.

Why does the floating cloud work so well?

Well, it can drift.  Sometimes it's more over Home, sometimes more over another place or places.

Also, it makes clear that, like cumulus clouds, TCKness is both substantial and disparate.  It is shape-changing and transmogrifying, and yet it also, paradoxically, coheres, just like clouds do.

And, for those of us wrangling with the troubling parallels between TCK and "expatriate" (increasingly synonymous with neo-colonial privilege, especially in the British media) here's something else that the cloud illustrates: TCKs do tend to have the option of being detached from the politics of their host countries.  Their passports, visas and parents' careers give them the freedom to leave and drift away.  We don't have to take that option: TCKs can be politically engaged and responsible . . . but it is worth noting that we often have the privilege of being able to choose to leave if the going gets tough.  For better or worse, we float, like clouds.

Napkins for Martel

I found my letter-on-a-napkin today, the one addressed to Yann Martel.  It was folded inside the pages of his book Self which I am thinking of re-reading as perhaps relevant in addressing TCL questions of self (that and Liliana Meneses PhD thesis "Homesick for Abroad: A Phenomenological Study of Third Culture Identity, Language and Memory", which looks like it will rock my world).  Anyway, this is what I say about Martel and the note in the introduction to my 2014 The Writer and the Overseas Childhood:


In 2003, I sat in a café in Halifax, Canada and scribbled a fervent letter, a love-letter of sorts, on a napkin.  It was addressed to Yann Martel, whose novel Life of Pi I had just read, but it responded especially to my discovery that Martel was a diplomat’s son, and, though Canadian by passport, had been raised all over the world.  Essentially my absorbent little billet doux argued that because we had such similar backgrounds (myself also Canadian and raised around the world) we should know each other—in fact we kind of  already did (that convinced was I that his internationalized experience and mine meant we would understand things about each other that no other Canadian possibly could).  Embarrassing, ardent, and I never sent it.  It was not until 2007 that I encountered Ruth Van Reken, author of Letters Never Sent (her title uncannily reiterating the heartfelt feeling of shared experience that catalyzed my own un-sent letter to Martel), and one of the key proponents of research into the lives of “third culture kids,” a term that was new to me at the time, and is still new to the field of English literary studies, but aptly describes Martel and authors like him: raised outside his passport nation (one culture), in a series of host countries (second cultures), as an expatriate (third culture).      

And here's the note, rediscovered today:

 I wonder if Cabin Coffee in Halifax still exists?  Ha!  A quick google suggests it does!   Fans, head on over for a pilgrimage.

The note says:

Dear Mr. Martel,

I had to travel all the way to Singapore to find a copy of Self--and I was consequently skeptical.  How good could a book be if it fell off the radar so fast?  Silly me.  Of course good books fall off the shelves and under beds or into dusty warehouses of obscurity or into expatriate exile.  I ought to have known that.  I do teach literature, after all.  Anyway, Self is terrific.  I love its pseudo-autobiographical sleights of hand.  If you are its pseudo-protagonist, I love you too (and I am no more crazy than the next person, I assure you).  I write this in a cafe in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada at the end of August 2003 (depressingly near my 33rd birthday, ah well).  Should you find yourself in this part of the world, I would be delighted to meet you .  (Perhaps my own peripatetic upbringing delights with recognition at your literary themes.)

Antje (Canadian via Germany, Holland, Singapore, Wales, Britain, Texas, Ghana and now, again, Canada)

(This might be an alarming note: it is an unprofessional one.  Treat it with some flippancy.)
 
 Going backwards in my progress forwards . . .

Fishing and New Ideas

In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf writes

Thought--to call it by a prouder name than it deserved--had let its line down into the stream.  It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until--you know the little tug--the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?  Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

I am concocting a new book outline.  See photographed below the catch of the week (the culmination of years worth of fishing!), the fragile nub of a beginning.

Lots of Questions about Gender

At the March 2015 Families in Global Transition Conference, during a keynote session entitled "Panel Of Dudes," Tayo Rockson was asked about his upbringing on four different continents, and about whether his sister had experienced the transitions across cultures differently.  He wasn't sure.  He thought about how different her adolescent  friends were and how hard it was to talk to them.  In the audience, I instantly had myriad questions for his sister: while growing up, or even now, could she be as fashion-forwards as her brother?  (Short-skirts, or even short sleeves, on girls must resonate differently in secular parts of Sweden and Muslim parts of Nigeria?).  Could she be as outgoing, as outspoken, as Tayo?  Were there limits for her conduct, aspirations and self-development that her brother couldn't even see?

 Like FIGT president Killian Kroll, Rockson is one of the up-and-coming movers-and-shakers of the TCK world, one of the handsome, well-dressed new vanguard of young TCK Men.  In a field in which the "seminal" first stage research  was dominated by American women  (Useem, Van Reken, and Cottrell, but with the exception of David Pollock) the rise of the well-dressed Male and (not necessarily "American") TCK scholar (Doug Ota, for instance) or advocate (Rockson, Kroll) is a pleasant surprise for those among us who are middle-aged female scholars of TCKness and/or are TCK themselves (mon semblable, mon soeur?) and it raises at least three questions:

1) (OH, bang my head against the wall in frustration) Will it take the engagement of young handsome Smart Men to garner "third culture" the recognition and credibility it has been struggling to attain since Useem coined the term in the 1960s?

2) Does the experience of growing up TCK vary significantly depending on a child's gender or emergent sexual orientation?  I suspect it does.  I don't think anyone has studied this systematically.

3) What can Third Culture Literature tell us about question #2?


What does third culture literature tell us about gender?

First, Have a look at my author list: there are more women on it in men.
Possibly romance writing is the only other contemporary market dominated by women.  Why?
Are women more interested in processing their TCKness through writing (fiction and non)?  Are women better at it?  Do they have a different level of need? of insight? of understanding?  Did they have different experiences growing up TCK than their brothers and therefore a higher predilection towards writing? 

Second, third culture authors (like any other author) have to make choices in terms of gender.  What gender is the protagonist?  While someone like J. M. Coetzee (not a TCK) frequently writes men aging flaccidly, he also does impressively female narrators (see Age of Iron, or his troubling character Elizabeth Costello).

Do third culture authors tackle this question differently?  Perhaps.  Perhaps TCAs systematically, intentionally, try to write both male and female sides, opposing sides, of the TCK experience:

Kate Greenway has female protagonists Frankie and Kate in White Ghost Girls (a fiction that draws somewhat on her own TCK biographical experiences), but a male one in The Bird Skinner (which does not: protagonist Jim Kennoway is an alcoholic veteran who used to have a talent for skinning and collecting birds).  Kennoway is the flip-side of the girls, their opposite.  He is old: they are young.  He is in America looking back on travel during WWII; they are in  Hong Kong during the Vietnam war looking back on life in America.  He was the one who worked; they were the ones who trailed.  He is male; they are female.

Ian McEwan's  The Children Act's successful female judge parallels  Saturday's successful male surgeon: music lovers, both of them, finding time and solace in music. Both are at the top of their professions, both make a quick mistake that ruins them.  It's as if McEwan has quite consciously sought parallel figures, in order to explore what destroys men at the peak of their careers, as well as what destroys women.  

But O'Neill (Netherland, The Dog) is tirelessly male.  Interestingly his characters are male in ways that are distinctively "expat" in that they aspire to a Hemingway-esque heroic masculinity.  They enjoy material privileges because of their race and education, and yet instead of centrality and authority ultimately find themselves steeped in alcohol, dislocation and marginality.

I wonder: is gender stereotyping in third culture literature more prevalent than in other contemporary literatures?
I can imagine why it might be: if the crop of authors writing now was born in the 1950s through 1980s, chances are it was their fathers who were posted overseas (for business, or mission, or military, or diplomatic work) and their mothers who "trailed": the TCK worlds of those decades was retrogressive in its gender norms. 

The world of international work (business, diplomatic, mission, military) is gendered differently, slightly more equally, these days: what will happen when TCKs born in the 1990s and later start writing?

So many questions!

I am, I know, terrible at writing about gender.  So much so that I wonder if I can blame it on being myself  the product of a fairly sexist era of TCKness?  In Malaysia when I was 8 or so my father asked me if I'd rather be a boy or a girl.  "Boy" I replied quickly "because then I could pee standing up" (a skill perhaps more valuable in some countries than others).  But I marvel at my response.  In that long ago neo-colonial world of 1980s and 1990s expatriatism, it was clear to me that my father got to have all the fun (business trips, in-flight drinks, scuba gear, linen suits, respect, acclaim, authority) and my mother had to deal with a lot of difficult stuff (menstruating in the tropics, finding herself a job in country after country, continually reinventing herself, finding food, clothing, schooling and shelter for my brother and I, and often being too-much in the public eye as men ogled her red hair and speculated, openly, about whether her pubic hair matched). It was clearly easier to be my dad than my mom.