Introducing… Lina

Posted by Lina on December 14th, 2007 | Categorized as Introduction | 250 views and 11 Comments

Hi everyone. I’ve been lurking for quite a while now, so it’s about time to introduce myself. Also, I’m not in the mood to write my essay and this is place is great for procrastination.

I only found out a couple of weeks ago about the whole TCK-thing. A friend of mine joined one of the facebook groups and I was curious what the name of the group meant - haven’t been the same since, it’s amazing what putting a name to the weirdness did to me

My story isn’t as colourful as most people’s stories here, I’m probably not even a proper TCK, but more a cross-culture kid. Who knows. My mum is German, my dad Arab from Israel. I was born in Germany, we moved to Israel when I was one and back to Germany two years later. Even though I hardly remember anything of that time, it influenced me a lot. What I do remember is feeling very lonely for a while after we moved back - my family in Israel is a very big one and I used to be surrounded by cousins and friends for most of the time. When I started school, we went back every second summer which was always wonderful. I moved to a different city (Aachen) in Germany for university but was unfortunately the only one among the friends I made on my course who’d lived in another country (or even another city/village/house). Don’t get me wrong, I really like them, but yeah… More years of feeling out of place. I’ve had itchy feet for quite a while and after three years at uni I finally got the chance to leave - so I spent a year in Wellington, New Zealand. Got a rather bad reverse culture-shock after I got back to Germany, and decided I couldn’t stay. I’m now doing another postgrad degree in the UK.

I was bilingual-ish as a kid (with Arab being my “more advanced” language) but after we moved back to Germany, I stopped speaking Arab. My parents told me it happened within a short time of starting to go to kindergarten. Apparently the other kids laughed at me. I can’t remember a thing but I feel totally sorry for my younger self :p Most of my life I spent living in a small village, surrounded by people who had no intention of ever leaving. During childhood the village was a great place to live for me and my younger sisters - I made friends there and enjoyed the muddy countryside a lot. It was only in secondary school when I started realizing I was different. Sadly, the others did so to. Never a good thing when being a teenager. I wondered a lot what on earth was wrong with me (why I wanted to leave). I also never found it easy to say I was German. I’m not Israeli either, despite having the passport. And Arab is not a nationality altogether.

The question of what feels like home… Despite having lived in one place for a long time, it doesn’t really feel like home. Well, the house does, not the village. Not anymore anyway. Baqa in Israel feels like home, but the house there doesn’t because we only ever lived in there for one summer. Aachen in Germany? Not really. Wellington definitely does . But if I say that out loud, people look at me like I’m crazy or something, because I spent “only” one year there - which in their eyes means that I’m not entitled to call it “home”. But it was a year in which I grew up more than I did in the previous ten years. At least it felt like it. There I learned that life can be the way I had always dreamed, that it does not have to be weird or unusual if you don’t want to spend all your life in the same place. And there I was surrounded by people who thought and acted much more like me. All of my 4 flatmates were TCKs or CCKs. About 90% of people I met were CCKs or children of immigrants or international students. The bonus of such a young nation. Anyway…

I am about half-way through the book and I’m loving it. Everytime I pick it up, I read something else I can relate to. It’s as if someone wrote down everything that made me feel out of place or not quite normal. It’s also full of post-its because I fully intend to shove the pages in questions under my parent’s noses when I see them again over Christmas - it’s the pages containing most of the things they ever “criticised” about me.. Mwah! It’s all totally not my fault.

Anyway, I just thought I’d say hi.