My lovely friend Nikki, having just returned to Singapore from a stint in Paris and being the product of a very global upbringing and agreed to write a piece for this blog. I am always interested to hear from Adult TCK's, their experiences and the highs and lows of growing up international!
Thanks Nikki!
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One thing that really gets my goat is when people tell me I
am Malaysian. I don’t mean that they ask me, I mean that they correct me, and
TELL me that I am not in fact Irish, I am Malaysian. If you knew me, you’d find this quite ridiculous too – I’m
almost 6 feet tall, have blue eyes and red hair and skin that burns before I
can even reach for the sunscreen.
I should say at this stage, that if I were Malaysian, I’d be
very proud to be, and my annoyance is not anything to do with the country or
its people, my annoyance stems from people trying to label me or make me fit
into their idea of nationality, heritage and that wonderfully challenging word
– Home!
Let me take a step back and introduce myself. My parents are
Irish, as are my grandparents, great-grandparents and as far back as it goes –
all Irish. My father was a rare breed for his day, and set sail to work in
Thailand and Fiji as a young man.
He worked for Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications company, and not
in the diplomatic corps or army. He
came back to Ireland to work for a brief stint, where he met my mother and
married her. My sister was born in
Ireland, but at that stage, my Dad had already left for his next expat
assignment in Tunisia. He kept the
telegram he received when he was told of my sister’s birth, and a few weeks
later, my Mum and my sister joined him in Tunisia. And so began decades of our
family moving around the world.
They stayed in Africa for a few years, and then moved to Malaysia, and
sometime in their 8 year stay in that beautiful country, I was born. This is where my initial rant comes in,
as there a lot of people who believe your birthplace defines where you are
from, and where you are from defines who you are. My parents moved back to
Ireland when they were expecting my brother, their third child. After 4 years of living in Ireland,
they threw in the towel and moved back to Asia. They have never moved back to
Ireland since. Every two to four
years, we’d be told of the next posting, and the circus of packing, saying
goodbye to school friends, finding new homes for the family dogs, getting on
planes and moving to a new country would start again. After Malaysia, we lived
in Egypt, Pakistan, Bahrain, Korea, India and Vietnam as a family. When we were
in school abroad, it was always in the international schools, and I spent most
of my time in Ireland trying to lose the American accent that all international
kids pick up on these schools! We all spent a few years in boarding schools in
Ireland, but came ‘home’ at every given opportunity.
I alluded to this earlier – ‘home’ is a difficult thing for
expat kids to understand. ‘Home’ for
me changes every two to four years, but home is also, and will always be,
Ireland. The norm is to have
one home, but I’ve finally stopped struggling to answer the persistent question
of ‘but where are you from, where is home?’, like I’m too dense to be able to
answer a simple question. I want
to scream that its not simple, but instead I resort to explaining that I have
many homes, and not just one. My home is where my parents are, where our
childhood photos are on the wall and where my Mum makes my favourite dinner on
my first night back. Incidentally,
that is currently Thailand where they have retired to, but I expect that might
change in the future. Home is also
Ireland, and I am very proud to be Irish. More on that later… And finally, home
is where I live right now, where I come home to after a long day and where I
have 2 spare rooms for visiting family and friends (one is never enough…).
Today that is in Singapore, but over recent years, that would have been France
and Australia. Yes, the wanderlust
that my parents experienced is now firmly ingrained in my life, and I too move
around every 2 to 4 years!
I remember when I first came across the phrase ‘Third
Culture Kid’, and a light bulb went off in my head. I have always felt
different, and here I found a group of people who were also different, and
therefore the same. The website I read talked about feelings of displacement (tick),
not knowing where home is but feeling nationalistic (big tick) and feeling out
of sync with my peers (tick). More
importantly, I read about how TCKs are more welcoming of others into their
community, how they can understand other cultures better than their average
friends, and how they go on to be well educated and do well in their
professional lives. While I can’t
judge myself, I like to think that I would list these among my strengths and so
this really helped to cement that I really was a third culture kid. I put my
hands up now and admit I am 38 years old, and cringe at the term ‘third culture
kid’, but I will use it for the purpose of this blog!
So back to being Irish! It would have been easy for our
family to become global nomads, and live without roots. However, luckily my
parents are both very proud to be Irish, and made sure that we knew where we
were from. While my Irishness is
not constrained to one day in March every year, we celebrated St Patricks Day
with gusto, and we could all sing along to the Dubliners, Pogues and other
songs which being Irish, you’re required to know! We learnt about our
ancestors, which was relatively easy as my mother’s family was quite a
prominent political family and played an important part in the history of Ireland. We went back to Ireland for our
holidays most years, and stayed with cousins and grandparents. In the early years, this was quite a
struggle for my parents. It is
hard to remember the days when to get from Asia to Ireland involved a minimum
of four flights, and when suitcases didn’t have wheels, or aeroplanes didn’t
have in-flight entertainment. I don’t
know how my mother coped, but she did so with amazing energy, as she would
usually take us home a few weeks ahead of my Dad and so had to do these
journeys on her own with 3 small kids.
She will also be able to tell the stories of how the trips home had to
be on boats in the early days, as planes just weren’t an option!
We had an amazing experience, growing up in remarkable
places, and if I were asked to choose now between a life of an expat kid or a
life of a ‘normal’ Irish kid, growing up in Dublin, I’d still choose the life
we led. For me, the constant was
always my family, and to this day, we are all very close. We live in four different countries, on
three continents, but I speak to each of them every couple of days. We are all on a plane with the drop of
a hat if we are needed, and I always know I have a room in any of their homes
for as long as I want it. As an
expat kid, you spend all your time with your family, leaving together, moving
to new countries together, being the new kids in school together and my home
will always be where they are, as truly home is where the heart is. They say
that 66% of third culture kids will continue to move throughout their adult
lives, while the other 34% will do everything they can to put down those
elusive roots. My brother and I
have continued to move as adults (although he is much more adventurous than me!)
whereas my sister has had the same house for ten years now, with a white picket
fence and her daughters have friends that they will grow up with in
school. I know that she dreams of
moving from time to time, but she is definitely the 34% in our family who loves
having her roots firmly planted where she is now. For now…!
I have been asked by a lot of parents living abroad on my
feelings of whether they should go bring their children up as expat kids or
not. I sensed some strong guilt
feelings in many, as they wondered would their kids prefer to be at home, close
to cousins and in one school until they graduate. Others wonder whether they will fit in at home if they do go
back, or is it already ‘too late’.
When I was asked whether I missed being part of a little-league team at
home, I first said that we didn’t have little-league softball in Ireland, but I
didn’t miss it because I was too busy horse-riding around the pyramids at dawn
on weekends, having birthday
parties on a yacht on the Nile, or playing war games with my brother in the
jungle of the foothills of the Himalaya’s in Pakistan. Yes I missed growing up with my
cousins, but my best friends were Thai, American, Indian, Pakistani, and
British and I was welcomed into their homes the same way that my Aunts and
Uncles welcomed me.
To all parents out there with young kids, I hope this blog
helps you to consider staying abroad and giving them the gift of being able to
call the whole world home.
Nikki
