About: Annette
-
Name:Annette
- Profile
- Denmark/USA/Denmark/USA arf@bharf.com
2008-06-17 04:53:35
http://
Posts by Annette:
Another TCK/Mil-brat success story
There have been a number of posts about occupations for ATCKs. What is clear is that many of us use our TCK experience in positive ways that meet our special needs as TCKs and benefits others. Many of us find real comfort levels working with “foreigners” in the countries we settle in. Here is such a story about an American military brat helping others to assimilate in California.
Marcy Jackson has received a Jefferson Award (http://www.jeffersonawards.org/) for public service for her work as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher. ESL teachers help bridge the cultural gap for their students as well, and Marcy Jackson has been a pioneer in this approach to language learning.
Obama: “Not only do I think I’m a desi, but I’m a desi”
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was fundraising in San Francisco last week when he said that. “Desi” is the Urdu and Hindi word for “local.” He went on to explain that he had had a Pakistani roommate his first year at Occidental College, and that he had many lifelong friendships with Indian and Pakistani immigrants as a result. He learned to cook various South Asian dishes, and generally described himself as having great affection for people from South Asia.
The entire article can be read here:
Could Obama be the first Asian American president?
Here, on TCKid, it has been pointed out that both Obama and McCain are TCKs, something I find very encouraging in the evolution of American politics. There was a terriffic column in my local paper today (San Francisco Chronicle) with the above title. Here is an excerpt:
“Could it be that our true first black president might also be our first Asian American president?
Fitting the curve
He was born and raised in Hawaii, the only majority-Asian state in the union; he spent four formative years in Jakarta, the home of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, where he attended local schools and learned passable Bahasa Indonesia. The family with whom he’s closest — half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and her Chinese Canadian husband, Konrad Ng — are Asian American. So, too, are the most senior members of his congressional team — his Senate chief of staff Pete Rouse, whose mother is Japanese American, and his legislative director Chris Lu, whose parents hail from China.
Evidence for Obama’s affinity with the Asian American experience runs true even as one delves deeper into his history. “A lot of aspects of the senator’s story will be recognizable to many Asian Americans,” says Lu, a Harvard Law School classmate of the senator’s who joined the team in 2005. “He talks about feeling like somewhat of an outsider; about coming to terms with his self-identity; about figuring out how to reconcile the values from his unique heritage with those of larger U.S. society. These are tensions and conflicts that play out in the lives of all children of immigrants.”
Jeff Yang writes the ASIAN POP column, and I highly recommend this one.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/07/30/apop.DTL&hw=obama&sn=010&sc=381
MULTI-CULTURAL, MULTI-ETHNIC, MULTI-RACIAL & IDENTITY
All TCKs are multi-cultural, lots of TCKs are multi-ethnic and a growing number are multi-racial. For all TCKs, identity is an issue we grapple with, often daily. The layers that form identity become evermore complex as factors are added in. It is one thing to be from a single ethnic or cultural group and raised in one or more additional cultures, and quite another to hold multiple identities in one’s very body as well as bouncing around though differing cultures.
I was reminded of this yesterday when reading a great article in my local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. The article is on the growing group of Americans who refuse to choose a single racial identity when they are, in fact, multi-racial. The springboard for the article is presidential candidate Barack Obama: Obama raises profile of mixed-race Americans. http://tinyurl.com/5cr6pv
The San Franciso Bay Area is a focal point for racial/ethnic/cultural mixing. Here, no combination of couple is noteworthy: all genders, all races, all ethnicities and all cultures are on parade, and in any and all combinations. So is it any wonder that people of all backgrounds are now refusing to be pigeon-holed by superficial racial characteristics? Why should people have to choose one part of their heritage over another?
As TCKs, we have an umbrella identity which we are just beginning to explore as a community. It is a big identity that holds many different kinds of cross-cultural experiences. I think we are a growing prototype of the new identity: world citizen. We are expanded beyond national boundaries, many across ethnic boundaries and a rapidly growing number across racial boundaries. As these boundaries blur and disolve, we are free to explore our commonalities and focus on our mutual humanity. We are free to see our differences through eyes that are curious and understanding rather than suspicious and condeming, and we are free to appreciate the richness of our blended customs, food cultures, music, and so much more, that make up the new supranational identity.
As world citizens, we are free to be those things that suit our personalities, to love those things that touch our hearts and to have brothers and sisters everywhere who are “our kind” regardless of what current societial organization may try to tell us.
One Upside of being TCK
I read the post “WHAT STRENGTHS MIGHT TCKs POSSESS AND HOW MIGHT WE DEVELOP THEM” with interest. One of my favorite things about being TCK is the ability to relate well to people of all ages. I was often the only child among adults, many of them in their 70’s and 80’s, and I discovered that they were really just old looking young people. I listened to them and heard stories about life before cars were common, life before air travel and got to know people who had spanned the horse and buggy era to space travel in one lifetime. Amazing.
Talking to old people, I also discovered that my generation didn’t discover rebellion, sex, drugs, music as a social vehicle or any of the stuff we thought we had the lock on when I was a teen in the 1960’s (think Summer of Love, Beatles, Vietnam war protests, Civil Rights movement, etc.). Today a friend sent me a youtube link to an old folk singer, Malvina Reynolds, singing “No Hole in My Head”. If you watch “Weeds”, she wrote the ”Little Boxes” theme music too. Tell me what you think. I think not much has changed…
Everybody thinks my head’s full of nothin,
Wants to put his special stuff in,
Fill the space with candy wrappers,
Keep out sex and revolution,
But there’s no hole in my head.
Too bad.
They call me a dupe of this and the other,
Call me a puppet on a string, they,
They don’t know my head’s full of me
And that I have my own special thing,
And there’s no hole in my head.
Too bad.
I have lived since early childhood
Figuring out what’s going on, I,
I know what hurts, I know what’s easy,
When to stand and when to run,
And there’s no hole in my head.
Too bad.
So please stop shouting in my ear, there’s
Something I want to listen to, there’s
A kind of birdsong up somewhere, there’s
Feet walking the way I mean to go,
And there’s no hole in my head.
Too bad.
Everybody thinks my head’s full of nothin,
Wants to put his special stuff in,
Fill the space with candy wrappers,
Keep out sex and revolution,
But there’s no hole in my head.
Too bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sooNNv9qHg
You’re NEVER “too old”
In a comment on my introduction story, Still Split After All These Years, Areke wrote: “I also find a, admittedly rather selfish, comfort in one aspect of your story - I hope you don’t mind me saying this - as in that it is possible to find someone at a slightly older age (I’m 35), someone who understands the TCK aspect.”
At 35, Areke has at least 40 years to find someone compatible. I know that, because my father fell deeply in love again, at age 75 some years after my mother died. An immigrant from Denmark, he found an immigrant from Iceland, a bit older than himself, and to both their surprise, they fell in love. The heart knows no age!! Until Alzheimer’s finally forced them apart almost two years ago, they were inseperable.
My father and his Aurora traveled all throughout Europe many times, and went on safari to Kenya and Tanzania when they were 80. He is almost 86 now, and active in his local community. Although Aurora now lives in an Alzheimer’s care facility, he calls her almost every day, and her caregivers and her son all agree that he will be the last person she forgets.
Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore….
It was the morning of my sixth birthday, and I awoke with a sense of delicious anticipation. I KNEW what this day would bring. I was so happy; I was wriggling like an excited puppy.
The year before, Preben, the baker’s son who lived upstairs, had turned six. I watched as his father tied a broomstick to his new two-wheel bicycle (no training wheels allowed!) and then guided Preben around our little street until he could let go without Preben falling over. I was still riding my tricycle, and even though it was a spectacular metalic purple with white striping accents and handle tassels, I was deeply envious. Preben had a big kid bike. I still had a baby’s bike.
So, the morning of my sixth birthday would mark the passage from little kid to big kid in my world. All Danish kids got a two wheel bicycle on their sixth birthdays. It was a cultural rite of passage.
My parents called me into the living room, sang for me and gave me a large gift wrapped box. In it was a beautiful doll. It was wonderful, but where was my bicycle? I finally screwed up my courage to ask, and was told that American streets had far too much car traffic on them to allow me to have a bicycle. I was very brave and did not show my disappointment, but inside I was crushed. Ten months after we arrived in California, I finally knew definitively that my life would never be the same; that things I took for granted had changed, and that there was no certainty upon which I could rely.
We lived on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood in a sleepy city across the bay from San Francisco. All my friends had bikes, but I never did, and I never learned to ride. When did you figure out your life was never going to be the same after a move?
The Name Thing
My name is Annette. In French and English it’s pronounced Ah-Nett.
That’s not my name.
My name is An-neddeh, or for English speakers, Annetta. Close enough. But it is such a relief to be with other Danish speakers, either in Denmark or abroad and not have to explain how my name is pronounced. Even my difficult last name (anglecized because of a Danish vowel-we have 3 more than English) is a non-issue to other Danes. I go to great pains to pronounce other people’s names correctly (i.e., as they themselves wish it pronounced), and I bet this is a very common TCK issue. Not much comes closer to the core of identity than the name we were given or the one we choose to be known by.
As a child, I allowed others to call me Ah-Nett, but as an adult I have insisted that people get as close to my real name as possible. Does this strike a chord with anyone?
Still split after all these years
I am a native of Denmark brought to the USA at age 5 when my parents emmigrated in 1955. I had been an outgoing child and suddenly became very clingy and shy. I started school shortly after we arrived, and the only English word I knew was elephant (taught me by a Scottish guest of my parents) which didn’t prove very useful. I was terrified and alone. No one else in the school was foreign.
In short order I became a punching bag for the other kids. Black, white and asian - I was the different one. Small, blonde and blue-eyed with funny clothes and a funny haircut (read European) that they ridiculed. The bullying continued through all six years at that school, ending on the final day with 3 boys (1 white, 1 black, and 1 japanese-american who had been my friend) beating me badly and threatening me with a saw. Is it any wonder that I was a really fast runner?? I’ve never entirely trusted Americans since, even though I have lived here for most of my life. No, the teachers never protected me, but my mother, who had 3 older brothers taught me how to defend myself.
It did not help that I was younger than my classmates when I started school and was then advanced a grade. Smart wasn’t acceptable either, but the next 3 years in a new school were better. I had some great teachers who encouraged me, and I met my lifelong best friend when I was 12, an internal TCK, who attended 6 or seven schools by the time we graduated high school. We often go for many years without seeing each other, but time and distance do not matter, we are like sisters and understand each other. I am so very grateful for her.
The summer I was 14, we spent in Denmark. We had been gone 9 years, and in the intervening time my favorite grandfather died, my favorite grandmother became demented from Alzheimer’s and my eldest uncle had died. My other grandparents were still so very angry at my father for emmigrating that they finally picked a huge family fight, and that was the end of the relationship with that side of the family.
I felt very comfortable back “home” and had no dificulty fitting in - sort of. I did not share many cultural references with my peers, a situation that I know many here can identify with. Nevertheless, that summer was wonderful. Re-entry was odd. The sky in California looked all wrong! a function, I later learned, of latitude differences. The scale of buildings and streets was off, everything was so NEW…after all, the castle in my hometown is over 750 years old and the “new” church is over 100.
One positive, for a brief time, after we returned from that summer, I was interesting to the other kids in high school. Then reality set in; I was an athlete (swimmer), serious muscician (flute) and an honor student, in other words a grind. And because I was 2 years junior to my classmates, I was also not allowed to date. But I wasn’t bullied anymore. I became great friends (still keep in touch) with our Turkish foreign exchange student. One other boy, an German/Chinese immigrant from Germany/China/Taiwan also became my friend. We all “recognized” each other!
I started university at UC Berkeley during the great student riots of 1967. I have been tear gassed many times and chased by soldiers with bayonets unsheathed. I learned far more outside the classroom than in, and dropped out at the end of my second year determined to leave America for good. I was fed up with the intolerance (racism) and with the Vietnam war, which I and my family vigorously opposed. I worked for a year as the Pacific Ocean high seas operator (ship to shore) and saved my pennies. At 20, I went home to Denmark for a stay that ended up lasting only a year.
Again, I fit in and I didn’t. My American education was vastly different in structure and content than a Danish education, and entering a Danish university was going to be very difficult. One uncle told me, with love, that Denmark had become too small for me. I was an odd duck in a very homogenous society. Nonetheless, I was grateful for that year. I sang in my local church choir and went to a Folk High School where I learned the Danish folk songs that, in large measure, unite Danes abroad. I sing with an informal group in the Napa Valley wine country now, driving 1 hour plus just to participate.
I have had 3 significant relationships as an adult, none with Americans. They don’t “get” me, though I didn’t understand why I didn’t feel comfortable with them until I read the Third Culture Kids book 2 years ago. My first great love at university was a Danish-American like myself. My mother hated him on sight. I now think that that was because my choosing someone like myself, from my own culture, with displacement experiences like my own seemed like a rebuke to her and my father’s choice to leave our home country. She never understood the extreme comfort level I had with this man, and spent the almost 4 years we were together doing her best to destroy the relationship, finally forcing me to choose between my boyfriend or my family. I chose my family (I had lost enough family already!!!!!), but I lost her too in the process, because I never trusted her or liked her again. When she died 14 years ago, my primary emotion was relief. I shed not one tear, nor have I missed her even once. Yes, I have spent LOTS of time in therapy.
My first husband was an engineer from a Pakistani ministerial family whom I met at work. His dad had been in the first government after partition, and all his uncles were high government types. Fortunately, they were not political, but rather the practical type of minister (heavy industrial development of Punjab, that sort of thing). I seriously enjoyed getting to know my husband’s very educated family. Like many upper class colonials, they were British to the core, British educated with British values. My late father-in-law was educated at the Inns of Court and had an OBE. It was a new and interesting world that I fit right into (chameleon!). We traveled extensively in Pakistan just after Bhutto was imprisoned by General Zia ul Haq. I wore shilwar kemise and saris made for me, and had a ball, but it was like playing dress up. I could not have sustained it.
We divorced after I was injured in a severe fall, and it turned out that my husband was not up to having a sick wife. Neither cultural nor religious differences caused the rift. Illness and injury is just something that some spouses cannot tackle. My ex stayed close to my parents, and has been very good to my father. He and his family have hosted him in Hong Kong when they lived there. We are cordially split.
I remained single for 7 years before marrying again at age 38. We have been married 20 years. My husband was born in Hong Kong, and is Chinese. We have known each other since we were 23 (university). He was raised here from infancy, so is actually very American, but he has the experience that I do of starting school unable to speak English.
I am very active in my local community, and well known by many people, but I am a loner with few friends. I really don’t trust people, and friendship is something I don’t know how to do well. I am sure that I fall into the standard catagory of finding it easier not to get too close because I will just have to give them up anyway.
These past 20 years, I have been going home to visit every 18-24 months. I have developed really close relationships with my cousins in Denmark and Norway, and my remaining aunts, who are now in their 80’s. I always feel displacement upon re-entry into the US, as I usually stay in Denmark for 6 weeks at a time. I have one foot firmly planted in both countries. As a childless woman, my husband once asked me what I would do if I became a widow. I unhesitatingly replied, “Go home.” The irony is, I can’t. I don’t meet the Danish legal standard of “enough connection” to the country to return. Even my home country is truly lost to me now.
Losses experienced as a child include all my little friends, all my family except my parents, my culture, my language, my identity, my sense of safety and my home. Like many TCKs, I was also victimized by a family member. I was left with a great-aunt and uncle when my mother entered the hospital for 3 weeks. I was seven, and it was only 1-1/2 years after we came to America. I sought comforting and my great-uncle used the opportunity to begin molesting me sexually, something that lasted for a year until I felt my mother was well enough to be told (she was very ill and I took over many household duties as she was bedridden). My parents believed me, thank God!, but I have an almost impossible time asking for help and comforting even today.
My avatar is a trusting little hedgehog that I am holding in my hands. Trust. It’s my big issue.
-
Top Commentators
- Ayako (750)
- Cynthia (518)
- Uncle Dan (485)
- miyon (455)
- kristine (355)
- mairabay (295)
- MsMerising (276)
- mmmmmm (249)
- marie (229)
- Isa (223)
Polls
Loading ...