Pop and Circumstance

It’s probably no surprise I grew up with a variety of influences and no clear sense of identity. I’m sure I’m not alone in that not being a problem while I was growing up. It wasn’t strange at all to my friends that I was a Vietnamese-American going to a British school in Indonesia because we were friends where that didn’t matter. 

This would change when I repatriated to the US for university and the inevitable questions came. I can’t even blame them because I was walking around claiming to be from Texas, and then meeting Texans who were confused when I knew nothing about Texas. The vaguely British and mostly international accent I had previously been unaware of could not have helped. 

The friends I was making would ask me questions and try to figure me out, and as a fresh-faced 18-year-old at the time I also wondered for the first time where I was supposed to fit in. They had a hard time putting me in a box they could understand, and as I was asking myself the same questions, suddenly I was insecure with my own lack of definition. 

Attending a university in the Midwest amid the advent of the first iteration of Facebook in 2004 meant that suddenly the great American debate about what to call a carbonated sugary drink seemed to matter all over campus. Midwesterners called it ‘Pop’, most of America  called it ‘Soda’, and much of the South confusingly called everything ‘Coke’ (but I guess it works for them). 

People would ask me what I called it. I had no idea. I struggled, thinking that I hadn’t grown up with any of these drinks, but surely I must have called them something. It didn’t occur to me at the time that people can also just not have a general term for that kind of drink. I didn’t have to choose one but felt compelled to, so very tentatively settled on ‘Fizzy Drink’” thinking that’s what the British people in the international school I grew up in might have called it. They didn’t, in case you were wondering. 

I did, eventually, say Pop one day, much to the celebration of my friends at the time, and much to an inner horror I couldn’t vocalise at the time. They were happy and felt like I was becoming one of them, but I felt like I was losing myself. In this new life, surrounded by people who couldn’t conceive of the lifestyle I’d grown up with because they had no frame of reference, my grasp on that identity seemed to be loosening. I was far, far away from  friends who understood me. 

My response was to try and choose an identity that, whatever it would be, wasn’t American. I met Vietnamese people and discovered that while my parents clearly identified themselves as Vietnamese, they had mostly just let me be whoever I was. But now, I had no idea myself. I met Indonesian students too who unintentionally reminded me of what I already knew: being an expat often very clearly defines you as separate from the host culture, no matter how many years you might live there. 

Nothing was really fitting. In a fit of nostalgia and a desire to reconnect with the friendships I’d left behind, I went to the UK for my spring break. I had a small adventure going all over the UK to see old friends who were now studying there.. One of them pointed out that my accent had changed to be more American but was  now changing back to more British tones. I felt revived by reaffirming the ties of my old friendships and felt oddly more comfortable in the foreign, but somehow slightly familiar, feeling of being in another country. I assumed that now I had found my box. 

Upon my return, I hung a British flag on my dorm room and started trying to incorporate “bloody” into my casual language a lot. This was a betrayal, I knew, because while growing up around my British friends I always thought that sounded silly. Nevertheless, declaring myself as British was going to be my way of telling all the Midwestern Americans around me that I was different and  this was the box I would choose for myself. 

I never found out how seriously they took that. 

I learned a lot more about myself when I moved to Switzerland afterwards. There I was clearly a foreigner so no one expected me to fit in. There was a huge box just for foreigners and we were all in it together, which is what bonded a few of us together. Quite naturally over time I stopped pretending I was British and started just being me. 

When I eventually learned about Third Culture Kids, this new identity was something I initially latched onto. Even though no one was trying to fit me into a box anymore, maybe this was it. A lot of people were just like me—trying to fit themselves into this new box. It was cathartic to be able to say I belonged somewhere, and thanks to the Internet and social media, we were all finding each other. 

Over time however, I started to feel wrong about it. I met some people who never had a big identity crisis and some whose crises were traumatic. I met some who had lived in dozens of places and some who only lived in a few. I met some who had repatriated to their passport countries and would probably never substantially leave again, and some whose lives still primarily took place outside of it. 

I realised that being a TCK was just another big box for all of us, and that true freedom of identity was being able to say, “This is me. I am just another human being discovering who I am, just like the rest of you.” I wouldn’t have gotten there, however, if I hadn’t tried all these identities to see what fit and what didn’t. 

Many TCKs dread the question “Where are you from?” but I don’t. I take every such interaction as an opportunity to remind people that the categories we place people in are just oversimplifications, and that no one is entirely of one group identity.  Each person is more interesting than any one aspect of their identity too, and everyone owes it to themselves to experiment and discover themselves, instead of just assuming the identity placed upon them by their societies.

Sometimes you have to go on your own internal journey and maybe, later on, everything ‘Pops’ into place. At least until you change and grow again.