How do you become qualified as a real TCK?
It’s funny cuz I live in canada Toronto (well at the moment) , and peole here are very multicultural to begin with… However they are not all TCKs-_- Which makes it even harder for me to try to explain TCK, because from what it sounds like, everyone in Toronto is apparently TCK. Especially since there’s a lot of immigrants. But I am getting quite sick of this because nobody ever tries to recognize how much more difficult my situation really is with theirs. LOL so here’s my rant about wht are the TRUE qualities of a TCK, the ones that ONLY REAL TCKS POSSESS! i noe this is reli childish… please forgive me. haha
1. The number of cultures you have been immersed in. This one is obvious, and if you don’t qualify for this one you wouldn’t even be on this forum. This is not even necessarily saying you have to have lived in different countries (especially since in Canada you can totally move from a completely Chinese neighborhood to a completely Caucasian neighborhood like 20 minutes drive away. ) Even if it’s the culture difference between public school and really prestigious private schools. That’s all differnet cultures. So, no, not necessarily different countries.
2. Exactly how different are the culture you’ve been immersed in? The first one may be easy but this is not that easy. I know many people who have attended International Schools for their whole life without actually going anywhere…Honestly, that’s not enough! I also know people who’s lived in Japan, CHina, Hong Kong etc…yah… REALLY BIG DIFFERENCE. Of course they are different, but if you have a combination like Egypt+Germany or like Greece+Korea or like Mexico+Switzerland, you are simply more QUALIFIED than those who have experienced cultures that are way too close to each other. Not that you are not a TCK if you have not had an extreme combination of countries…but you certainly can become more TCK than you are right now. Personally I think my combination is not extreme enough so I am not resting until I’ve lived in a combination of very different countries.
3. How closely connected you have become emotionally/mentally with all the cultures you have immersed in? This is possibly the most important above all. And sadly, most people who don’t get why I am a TCK and they are not is because of this one. Nowadays, we of course have a bunch of people who have lived in many places. but the question is…how many of them are really crazy in love with all the places they’ve lived in? An example would be all the students who come to Canada to study and they are totally planning to return to wherever they came from as soon as they finish because they don’t really give a damn about Canada at all. OR those who came to Canada when they were WAY too young and completely forgot about their own country, so basically they are determined to stay with no intention to leave. How are you a TCK if you are only so interested in one place? TO be a TCK, you would either have to be too numb to care about where you are or you have to be too much in love with wherever the hell you are to care about where you are at the moment. Basically the most important quality of TCK is to always want to return to other places, but never want to leave this place you are at. Yes that’s kinda sad but that’s true but I think most people have gotten used to this feeling already. I certainly did. It’s annoying sometimes but at least it gives me good inspirations for writing a touchy silly poem. Real TCK will never think that “this is the last place I will stay at in my life”, real TCKs do not know where is that LAST place until they die. Real TCKswill keep travelling even though it hurts like hell to leave everytime. However that’s ok because as soon as real TCKs arrive at the next destination, they will be too happy to leave again.
Sigh I guess that’s my take…maybe there are some rather depressed TCKs who don’t care where they are going because they hate everywhere-_- I reli hope that’s not true. cuz the world is too awesome to hate.
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Haha, the funny thing is, other people do not see TCKs as superiors at all, in fact some almost think we are inferior. But…not their fault…cuz we appear weird.
Nah I don’t think TCKs are superior, but we definitely got some superior qualities…hehe
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February 23rd, 2008 at 10:10 am
” However I am just sick of this sometimes because I know I will always have to be the “understanding smiling” person..” < —I can relate to this. It can get tiresome sometimes to always be the one with the open mind who can accept any cultural deviations with the whole world kind of telling you how wrong minded you are when you make the slightest deviations from ‘their’ norm!
Right now I’ve reached a stage in my life in Spain where I can’t bear to be with people because I got so sick of this
I’ll come out of it eventually but right now I just don’t want to deal with it!
“Well this is Spain so you have to xxxx and xxxxxx and xxxxxxx. Oh? Japan and China don’t have the same cost of living? But you can talk to each other can’t you? blablabla. You know I have heard that Japanese people are born with cameras hahaha….blablabla” < —-One can take only so much of this. There’s a limit.
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February 23rd, 2008 at 5:52 pm
LOL EXACTLY!!! sigh yep…the stereotypes drive me insane. Unfortunately a lot of people who think they are multicultural thinks the.
Yah, honestly, sometimes I just look at them and think…you know what? You make some of the stupidiest mistakes and do some of the worst things and guess wt? I don’t have a problem with it cuz I notice that everyone in the world makes mistake, in fact I try to understand you and be there for you. And all I get in return is to not even get any respect (don’t even think about understanding)?????!@#$%^&*()….yah…haha. So that was my venting.
I honestly wish everyone in the world was TCK, cuz then everyone would be understanding and sterotypes would probably die for good.
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February 23rd, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I wouldn’t call the US TCK country at all. If it were, I’d be fitting in better
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February 23rd, 2008 at 10:23 pm
“” However I am just sick of this sometimes because I know I will always have to be the “understanding smiling” person..” < —I can relate to this. It can get tiresome sometimes to always be the one with the open mind who can accept any cultural deviations with the whole world kind of telling you how wrong minded you are when you make the slightest deviations from ‘their’ norm! ;)”
No kidding. Sometimes I just get childish and bitter about it and want to cross my arms and say, “Ok, world, your turn to understand me!”
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February 24th, 2008 at 8:24 am
lol yeah, Tess.
In fact I do that sometimes when I’ve really had enough
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February 24th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I have appreciated all the comments and will add just a few of my own here.
First, perhaps it would be helpful to review the origin of this term, in case you didn’t read the TCK book yet!. It began in the mid-fifties when Dr. Ruth Useem when to India to study how people from two cultures would do business together. She became fascinated with her observations of the expat community, how its members came from one culture (the first) and moved to the host culture (the second) and had formed an “interstitial culture”…a way of living familiar to these expats but neither like their home or host culture. When she went back to teach at Michigan State, she paid new attention to those in her classroom who had been raused in the “third culture” and called them third culture kids. BTW, her husband also went with her to India and his work in academia centered on “Men of the Third Culture”. The point is that when it was first defined, there was a visible place/world that marked this “third culture.”
her work lay in academic journals for about twenty years but in the late 1970’s, Dave Pollock came along, lived near an international school in Kenya, began to notice these kids were different in various ways than those he had worked with before in the States, he picked up the term Dr. Useem had developed since all of those he worked with were in a visible “third culture” expat world and he began working to develop his classic TCK Profile (section two of the TCK book). When I went to the first international conference on this in 1984, a speaker, Dr Ted Ward, said that TCKs were the prototype citizen of the future, meaning that this lifestyle of living among and amid and between various cultural worlds in a highly mobile society would one day be the norm. The point is, that’s the day we have come to now.
SOOOO, it is for that reason I have been trying to enlarge the term from TCK to CCK these last few years. The reason? In these last several years, as the concept of TCK has spread, so many many people have said exactly the type of question this post is about “I didn’t grow up in this specific way, but I relate to the profile you describe. Why? Am I or am I not a TCK?”
At first, it seemed no problem to say, “Sure, you can all be TCKs…if you feel, you can be it!” in a sense. This has always been about trying to describe an experience, not define a new us/them modality. Even Ruth Useem wrote in reply to a letter I wrote her for our slight expansion of the term for the TCK book, that concepts evolve with time as situations grow and change as well. So these questions are good ones..how do we define TCK in today’s world?
The problem is, now, however, exactly waht my researcher friends warned about earlier. If there is NO differentiation of definitions, then language adn terms lose their meaning.
SO, that is why, for me, in developing the CCK model that I believe Brice has earlier on this site, it is a working modelt to see if we can look at both “sameness” adn “difference” …IN other words, if we have an overarching name of CCK for these many types of expereinces listed and have other circles come from that one, we can look at the picture adn see that some are in 3 or 4 circles, including the original idea of a TCK being a person who actually moves into a nother cultural world with his/her parents. Then we can start to plot out where all the types of experiences many have been listing fall into place and begin to see perhaps what are the things that develop in any type of CCK background (incoluding the traditional one) and what is different or special for each subset way it happens?
That is a great discussion and one sorely needed un iyur wirkd,..and here you are doing it. If you go back to the CCK circles/diagram I THINK Brice has posted, or the definitions he gives from that model in his posting here, would that larger language and picture help? That way, as Jerry said, we can look at the issues without being exclusionary yet also find our place in the specific way our life has been shaped by some of these experiences…
There are ny thoughts for why this is such a key place to begin hashing out some of the implications for the new realities happening in our world culturally.
What I liken the “traditional TCK” experience to at this point is it is like a “petri dish”…the issues of both the gifts and challenges developed in a fairly straightforward world of the actual “third culture”…if we look at that, see what these common characteristics are and WHY they are…(that was what the editor made us look at in writing the TCK book so do not skip chapters 3 and 4!!)then we begin to look around us and see that those same things are very operational in people of other types of cc experiences..and yes, in the end, we can become part of providing effective answers for today’s fast changing world.
so thanks for the reminder of both why/how this is getting more complicated to explain but also more universal to experience…may all these discussions be fun (a lot of great writersand thinkers here!), may they be informative, may they be friendship building, and may they help us find more answers for our changing world. Some may disagree with me, but for me, being a TCK is the experience I’ve had which has shaped me profoundly, but it isn’t who I am in the ultimate sense of my life. Never forget the TCK is first and foremost a person (see the definitionQQ) and from that reality, we can use our experiences well and learn a bunch from others who had different experiences because they are also persons!
sorry this is so long…you’re a great group!
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