Uncle Dan’s Notes: TCKs Still Living the Life

Posted by Uncle Dan on February 27th, 2008 | Categorized as Blog, General Forum | 315 views and 12 Comments

One thing I notice a lot here are TCKs who are remarkably balanced in life, and feel at peace with their mobile nature. It’s a marked contrast with some of the TCKs I’ve met online, either through here or the Facebook group, so I thought I’d ponder on that.

One definite factor though, is that quite a few TCKs here haven’t had to repatriate yet. I know that I didn’t think very much about my sense of identity or restlessness until I went “back” to the US, and encountered everything at once with lasting effects. It forced me to think a lot about my life, and I’m still thinking about it. Some of these people have never had to. I imagine that if you’re still moving around just as much in your adult life as your adolescence, you’ll reach a point of emotional consciousness where you might begin to question your identity, but for some of the people here I can’t imagine it for at least another five or so years, considering how they are.

This is also not a cheap university. The fees are almost as expensive as any American university, and is privately owned. Only Swiss citizens get any discount, and there aren’t many of them. So to support this, either the students here or more often their families still have an at least comfortable income, or a supporting agency. TCKs and CCKs don’t usually have the latter case here, since they’re mostly Germans and Norwegians supported by government scholarship. This is just to say: Their families have money, money enough to support an ongoing mobile lifestyle.

There’s a Bruneian (ish) girl who, after finishing her Master’s here and doing an in-training in Geneva, has decided to go to Japan to learn Japanese, and is supported by her parents on the vague notion that it’s still productive behavior. There was a Thai/Indian who could still afford to fly business class to Bangalore or Bangkok with stopovers in Dubai to sip Whiskey in the lounge. A German (ish) who’s heading to Kuala Lumpur after graduation for a management training, and can afford to pad his proposed salary from his parents, to enhance his lifestyle and experience there because he knows that’s the important thing, not the money itself. There’s a Korean (ish) who, unsure of the future, has the steady option to take a few months and travel around Europe while he works out the details.

These people are well past the 18-years-old mark which seems to mark the end to the “official” TCK-lifestyle-experience, but keep going, because they can afford to.

As such, they often haven’t had to face the same issues. Some of them have. A Hong Kong CCK tells me about his adventures back home, from the humorous to the deep, about how he appears so exotic to have learned to party in Europe, which makes him more interesting in a secret and silly way, but nevertheless alone. Or the German CCK girl who returns to her hometown in Germany to find that she can’t really recognize all her friends anymore, and that Ireland isn’t the home it used to be.

But in most cases, they wouldn’t have to come onto a website like this, because their life is still ahead of them, and in some ways they remind me of when I was 17. Living the good life, and entirely at peace because their life thus far had been mobile, international, and multicultural, without anyone questioning them for what they are. In ways I’m quite jealous. I see them and wish I were as well connected, and comfortable.

Daniel Nguyen-Phuoc

Vietnamese in ethnicity, born in Houston, Texas. Lived in Jakarta, Indonesia for 14 years while going to a British International School to finish with the International Baccalaureate. Survived only two years in the University of Michigan before ending up in Switzerland. Graduated from an international (and that's meant in every word) hospitality college. Interesting life, to be sure. But not the only one.