In the dedication of the TCK book, there is a line there that confuses me: “And to our children who have taught us so much — TCKs “for true.”

I was wondering if you could al lgive me your interpretation of what the “for true” bit means? Does it mean to stay true to our lifestyle? The lessons we have learned?

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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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Hi everyone!

I thought, as we have a music thread that we should have a film thread also. I thought that perhaps we could put down TCK films or just films that we have enjoyed and perhaps add some quotes as well?

I’ll start: I just saw The Kite Runner. It is a film of two boys Amir and Hassan in Afghanistan prior to the Russian invasion of the 70s. Hassan is the son of the servants and a Hazara. The two grow up like brothers until Amir and his father flee to America.

Years later, he hears that Hassan is dead and thatHassan has asked him to go and collect his son from Afghanistan and to keep him safe.

Several points that i found interesting were:

• Amir is, essentially a TCK and i liked that he remarks upon returning to Afghanistan:

“I feel like a tourist in my own country.” To which his driver replies; “You always were, you just never realised it then.”

• The son answers in English in America to his father even though the father speaks to him in his native tongue.
• Only occasionally does Amir answer his father in his native tongue and it is slow in coming as if he has partially forgotten.
• The father at times speaks in English to Amir.

I liked how the film makers have done that — someone who is not bi-lingual or has never lived in a country where the language spoken there is not their native one does not understand the consequences of language loss or acquisition of their children.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=-1Ivdc76nAY[/youtube]

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