So my vacuum chamber is broken and I gave my precursor molecule to someone else to do an experiment with that hasn’t worked yet, and I’m a little short on research I can actually do. I decided to see if I could dig up some more research pertaining to TCKs with the free time. (Don’t tell my advisor! I printed 200 pages on Friday!) I found a lot of stuff that sounds cool. I haven’t read nearly all of it yet, but one paper stood out to me as particularly interesting. I wrote a blog post on it with some more detail, but I was wondering what you guys thought of the thesis and of what I think is a good way to pinpoint how a TCK is different from a CCK.

In the paper (Hong, Y.-Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-Y., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2000) Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition. American Psychologist, 55(7), 709-720), Hong et al point out that culture has been seen in cross-cultural psychology like a contact lens that influences you all the time. They think seeing culture as a network of knowledge makes better sense, because that makes it natural to describe being part of more than one culture as having two or more culture networks that can kick in. Intuitively, that makes total sense to me. Sometimes something makes me ‘kick in’ to a particular cultural mode. In the paper, they talk about people using one cultural network in one situation and another network in another situation.

I think that we third culture kids have cross-linked cultural networks. Bicultural people and CCKs can switch between two networks, whereas I think we just fuse our cultural networks into one big network and that’s why it’s so frustrating when people we meet don’t understand all of our culture networks. I think that’s what the third culture really is – connecting several cultures into one cultural network. What do you guys think? Makes sense? Did I miss something? Feel free to comment here or on my blog, if you like.

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Since I’ve already posted on the forums, I should probably introduce myself. I’m a business brat born in Sweden, moved to the States when I was three, moved back to Sweden, then moved to China. ABB is my sponsoring organization. After I graduated high school, I went to a liberal arts college called Knox College in Illinois, and now I’m getting a PhD in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I had a hard time with repatriating to Sweden. Moving to China was wonderful, because it let me live in the third culture very freely. Who can expect much of a stupid foreigner, anyway? Anything beyond “Ni hao” is bonus as far as society’s expectations No one batted an eye at mixing different foreign ideas and traditions the way Westerners do. I found out I was a TCK in college, when I stumbled on TCKWorld.

The more I’ve thought about being a TCK, the more I discover about myself. My family has a rather strong third culture quality no matter where we’ve lived, because my father is Polish-Swedish bicultural and my mother is Finnish-Swedish bicultural. They have never been particularly keen on nationalism. However, my mother is an expressed feminist and having spent years in one of the most egalitarian cultures on Earth, I’m realizing now that as much as I dislike Sweden due to how badly the repatriation went, I’ve been very influenced by expectations of gender equality. Sisulla harmaan kiven lapi. My ideas about nudity and sexuality and their respective meanings also seem different from people outside the Nordic countries. I’m also rather American in being ambitious and making no apologies for it. Together, these two experiences don’t go over well in either country, unfortunately. I’m not sure I can properly analyze how China has influenced me, but I didn’t live there nearly as long as either the US or Sweden. I don’t think enough time has passed for me to know yet. I just am what I am, and seeing the parts of the whole isn’t nearly as easy as one might think, as I’m sure many of you know.

After I defend, I want back to the international business culture. I’m considering management consulting. I feel like it’s the closest substitute for an island with only third culture kids. The day I earn my first Senator card, I will be as home as I ever think I will be.

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