My Culture, My Home
I was sitting on a wooden bench, my fingers numb from the frigid air and greasy from the dripping hot meat. The harsh lights beat down on the tables, wiping out any stars you might have glimpsed in the black depths. Eight people, plus me, sat around the table, wiping their own grease on the paper tablecloth. We laughed with our mouths full, chattered over each other, and picked fun. We were only twelve, after all.
I stopped chewing in the middle of a mouthful. I scrutinized the people sitting at that table and realized that these were my friends. A year ago, I had never met them. A year ago, I was halfway across the world. A year ago, I had no idea that I would be uprooted from my mostly comfortable life. Now here I sat, eating grilled lamb with my bare hands in a new country and acting like I had known these people forever. In that moment, I realized that I was a TCK.
TCK stands for Third Culture Kid and refers to people who, like me, live in a country that is not their passport country. They meld the culture of their passport country and that of their host country into one culture that I could call a mega-culture but is really more of a mismatched ball of mistaken identity.
For a TCK, “home” is a difficult term. Often, “home” applies to wherever I happen to be crashing that night. Home could be my passport country, or it could be my host country, but neither one quite fits the bill. When I am back in America, the familiarity of it sets in. I feel too comfortable, like I never left, until some small change hits me. Often it is not a change to the landscape or the location, but more of a shift in my own inner self. I realize that I am no longer that buck-toothed, platinum-blonde little girl, racing down that sidewalk on my purple-streamered bicycle. I stand in the same place, older, taller. Knowing more. Knowing less. Knowing for sure that I am no longer the same. Knowing that I stand on the cracked pavement of a Used-to-Be, under the autumnal colors of a past life that already blankets the grass.
When I return to Tunis, Tunisia, North Africa, to the overflowing trash bins and chaotic traffic, to the palm trees and sticky weather, to my kind neighbors and my open-armed friends… I pause in the doorway. My bags drape off my arms and the tile ekes the heat from my body and I wonder, is this it?
I have experienced the streets of Madrid when the cold crystallizes your lungs and the strings of holiday lights illuminate the sky, I have seen the world from the top of the Alps with the climb burning, chill, in my legs, I have marveled at the vast wheel of inky sky over the endless, soft, shivering sands of the Sahara, I have watched hundreds of yellow butterflies take to the dripping sky on the banks of the Amazon, and no time, nowhere, have I found a home.
My life sets off a longing. It reveals an aching that normality buries under complacency. I am truly and irrevocably able to comprehend the fact that this world was never my home. My home lies with my Creator, in an eternity I can only imagine. To be a TCK is to live a moment away from that knowledge. When I live in consistently fulfilled need, I live in constant reminders to remain grateful, trust again and again (even when it fails to grow easier), remember the humanity and eternal soul of everyone I encounter, and never be permitted to forget that this earth will never be home.