AsiaLIFE

Meet the third culture kids. Some have lived in Cambodia since infancy, whereas others are more recent arrivals. They know how to bargain at the markets, sometimes go to school via tuk-tuk, and all have a complex answer to the question, “Where are you from?”

These kids are globalisation personified. As one puts it, “You’re from one country, and you live in another country, and together it makes another culture.”

Mai Lynn Miller Nguyen hangs out with some of the youth who call Cambodia home and learns a thing or two about the third culture kid experience. Photos by James Grant.

Twenty years ago, there was only one international school in Phnom Penh. Families came predominantly in missionary, humanitarian or development capacities, and the population of expatriate children was but a fraction of what it is now. As the country has grown and diversified, foreigners now end up here for all sorts of reasons, bringing the kids in tow.

The phrase “third culture kid” was coined in the 1950s by sociologist Dr. Ruth Hill Useem, following interviews with the expatriate community in India. She claimed that in straddling a “passport” culture and a “host” culture, kids create a lifestyle and culture distinct from either.

In Cambodia, kids’ daily lives are not too unlike that of their peers in more developed countries. They play sports, do homework, jam in bands, have sleepovers and master games on Nintendo Wii. At weekends, they shop at Lucky Supermarket with their families, attend church and go out to dinner.

Nonetheless, they live in Cambodia. They often have Cambodian nannies, they learn how to do the “coconut dance” in music class, they witness conditions of hardship on a daily basis, and as Mary, 19, frames it: “Normal dinnertime conversation here is not so normal” compared to developed countries.

Becoming a Global Citizen

When asked if he’s a third culture kid, Erik, 19, hesitates for a moment.

“I guess, maybe,” he replies.

Born in Sweden to Swedish parents, he lived in Stockholm until he was 17. It’s fair to say his sense of identity has become a little more complicated than it was pre-Cambodia. Erik refers to a British friend who has lived here for eight years and describes himself as “like an egg. White on the outside, yellow inside.”

“That’s kind of like how it is,” says Erik. “I wouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination call myself Asian, but I live in Cambodia, I was brought up on Swedish values, I go to a school with a lot of American values, and I’m exposed to 40 to 50 different nationalities each day and all their different opinions. That’s where this whole “global citizen” thing comes up.”

Culture shock is a feeling shared by both adults and kids, but the situation of spending formative years in Cambodia has its unique aspects. Especially as the decision to move to a foreign country is ultimately in the hands of the adults.

The initial transition was difficult, Erik admits. With all his classes in English, he found learning and conversing in a second language a struggle—not to mention adjusting to the environment and way of life in a country so unlike Sweden.

Erik compares his experience to his parents. “My brother said, ‘Mom and Dad have it so much easier than us.’ For us, being in Cambodia is being at home. We go to school, we have our friends, we have our life. For Mom and Dad, it’s a vacation if you compare it to how they had it in Sweden. They have this much more relaxed lifestyle now.”

It’s natural for kids to feel homesick when they land in Cambodia. Erik found that his adjustment came with time and effort.

“If you’ve just arrived here, try to stick it out,” he advises. “Sure, you might think that everything is so weird and so hard, but if you just try and get used to it, it’s one of the best experiences you could ever dream of having.”

“I live in Cambodia, I was brought up on Swedish values, I go to a school with a lot of American values, and I’m exposed to 40 to 50 different nationalities each day”

At Home in Cambodia

For some kids, a period of adjustment doesn’t apply. They’ve been here for pretty much as far back as they can remember.

“We have pets,” says EK, an 18-year-old South Korean, about the kids who have “planted roots in Cambodia.” EK has lived in Phnom Penh since the age of four.

“I feel like I belong here,” adds her classmate KK, an 18-year-old who is mixed French-Cambodian and has been here since 1995. “These are my people, this is my country. Leaving this place [for college] is going to be hard. I’m too accustomed to the freedom, the niceness of people.”

KK feels more Cambodian than French. “Maybe 75 percent Khmer although I’m only half. But because of my third cultural aspect, I don’t see myself as fully Khmer,” he says.

“This is the only place I’ve been, and I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else. It’s what I know and what I grew up with”

“People at school say I look and I sound Cambodian because I speak Khmer,” says Nadine, a 9-year-old “halfie” whose mother is Filipino and father is Sri Lankan. Along with her sister Nadia, she has lived in Cambodia all her life and is fluent in Khmer. “When our parents need something, we translate to the nanny,” she says.

Inevitably at some point during visits to the Philippines or Sri Lanka the girls start to miss Cambodia. Nadia, 13, admits that at a younger age, she sometimes wished she lived in a country with more fast food, shopping malls and amusement parks. But now, Cambodia is just simply home.

“I don’t want to move,” says Nadia. “This is the only place I’ve been, and I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else. It’s what I know and what I grew up with.”

Nadine adds: “It’s not like you’re in a foreign country, it’s, like, where you’re from.” The diverse community is cited as the best thing about living in Cambodia—at school, Swedes and Finns joke about their nations’ historical rivalry, Japanese and Koreans get along, and a Pakistani-Danish and an Indian-American are said to be best friends. “We’re a mix of different cultures,” says Nadia. “There’s no bullying, or bias, or racism.”

Nadia enjoys International Day at school. “It’s really fun because each country has its own room or its own booth where you can go and see what it’s like,” she explains. “Me and my friends went around seeing what we could buy and what foods we could try. [I liked] the Singaporean tea or the Japanese sushi, but what we liked the most was the Indian henna.”

Besides the lack of youth-oriented activities and places (the lack of roller coasters comes up with a few kids), the hardest part of living in Cambodia can be the transitory nature of the expatriate community.

“I’ve been the one that watches everyone come and go,” says EK, one of the few kids who’s gone from kindergarten to graduation in her school. The one time when she wanted to move back to South Korea was about five years ago, when several friends were leaving. “I was having a hard time, but I got over it,” she says.

Nadine, who had a best friend leave for Vietnam, agrees that losing classmates can be painful, but then it gets better. “The first day of school is kind of scary because no one is your friend yet,” she says. “You want to go home the next day, then you come back the second day, you make a new friend and you like it again.”

Betwixt and Between

Mary, 19, teaches art and English at a school in Phnom Penh. Born in the US, she has lived in Cambodia on and off for about 16 years. She spent most of her childhood here while her parents worked as missionaries, then moved back to Portland, Oregon for her last two years of high school.

“I was not going home, I was going to a foreign land and it was scary,” she laughs. The first year of living in the States was lonely.

Making friends didn’t come as easily as it had in Cambodia. “You are used to deep friendship coming really quickly,” she says. “Your friends are usually here only as long as their parents’ contract, which is two years usually.”

“When I go back to the States, everyone thinks Cambodia is like this post-apocalyptic wasteland”

The challenges of repatriation can be a rude awakening. A foreign culture is expected to be difficult; the passport country is expected to feel like home. But in their own passport country, they can feel like outsiders.

“People would be like, oh, you’re new, where were you before this?” says Mary. “I’d be like, do I lie? Do I say I live in Asia because then they’ll just be like, huh? Or do I say I lived in Cameroon because they won’t know the difference?”

Tabitha, a Filipino-American who has lived in Cambodia since birth, also encounters her share of questions. “When I go back to the States, everyone thinks Cambodia is like this post-apocalyptic wasteland,” says the 13-year-old. “Some kids ask, ‘Do you go to school?’ ‘Do you have internet?’”

Living abroad develops a new outlook. It’s a sort of “reverse culture shock” to go back and see your passport country with new eyes. “When I hear kids back in Sweden complain about the most trivial things, like, ‘I don’t have the latest iPhone,’ you feel like smacking them,” says Erik. “I know that a couple of years ago, I was the same. I can’t help feeling that they don’t really know what’s out there, what real problems are.”

EK discusses a similar sense of feeling different from kids in South Korea. “You can’t help that you’re more diverse and know more things than other people do,” she says. “It makes you sound condescending. That was the hardest part about going back to Korea every summer, talking to friends who lived in Korea their whole lives.”

A League of Their Own

Tabitha describes going back to the Philippines as awkward. “I don’t really speak Tagalog,” she explains. “I feel more uncomfortable than I do when I’m at school, because I don’t act like them, or talk like them, or look like them so much. And when I’m in America, I can’t connect to people on the same level as I can connect to TCKs (third culture kids) at school.”

Even though third culture kids originate from different nations, the third culture is universal. EK mentions that she ends up befriending other “TCKs” when she spends summers in Korea. “It’s like a small community,” she says. “But we wouldn’t want to identify ourselves as a whole different species, we would love to fit in wherever we go,” says EK.

In a sense, that’s what all these kids can do: Fit in. Exposed to so many different cultures and a diversity of experiences, they have a level of cultural understanding, tolerance and perspective rare for their young age. It’s not hard for them to find some common ground with anyone they meet because they’ve already covered so much ground.

Fitting in is one thing, but belonging is another. So while they may share the abilities of a chameleon, their internationalism means they can’t quite feel part of any single culture. But, they sort of have their own.

When Mary moved back to the US, she attended a transition seminar for third culture kids, which she found encouraging for realising that she wasn’t alone. The other third culture kids could quote the same things, laugh at the same things, and experience the same shock of visiting a Walmart megastore.

Family Values

With her advantage of experiencing domestic and international life, Mary’s not so convinced that being raised in a foreign country is the ideal. “Growing up, I thought this was the best thing you could do for your family,” she says. “But when I was in Portland and had friends who’d lived in the same house their entire lives, it was appealing as well. Maybe not for me, but it made me realise that this is not necessarily the best.”

Whether in the host country or the passport country, some sense of stability can be crucial for easing through the rough times. The support of a family goes a long way.

“Because the expat community was so small when we came, I was basically just hanging out with my mom and my dad,” says EK. “They went through the same language barrier of not being able to speak English or Khmer. That was the hardest part, but being around my parents and my sister was pretty rewarding.”

“You can’t help that you’re more diverse and know more things than other people do. It makes you sound condescending”

Tabitha says that she enjoys hanging out with her parents and their family friends. “In America, there’s more of a culture of parents are lame,” says Tabitha. It’s still somewhat like that here, she jokes, but less so.

With her experiences of culture shock several times between the U.S. and Cambodia, Mary suggests that kids having a tough time transitioning should stay close to their families. “They’re the people who are going to be there with you,” she says. “Your brothers and sisters are always going to understand what you’re going through, so don’t shove them away. They’re going through the same thing.”

She also urges parents to pay attention to what their children are going through, and all that they can be exposed to while living in Phnom Penh, where freedom in one’s salad days can lead to risky situations.

Third Culture Adults

How do the kids feel about being third culture kids? Though they still grapple with issues of identity and belonging, the consensus seems to be that it’s just who they are and who they’ll always be.

“I like growing up here, because I see everything from different perspectives,” says Tabitha. “I know that if I grew up in America, I might have a more monocultural view of things.”

In the future, Tabitha sees herself “living somewhere that is not America or the Philippines, probably speaking a different language, doing something significant, helping people.”

EK also plans to maintain an international lifestyle. Like many of her classmates, she’s heading off to college in a country foreign to her, the US—another place to get used to. “It’s been such a good experience, why give that up? It opens the door to a lot more things,” she says.

When Erik thinks about having kids some day, he says he wouldn’t want to raise them in Sweden. “Sure, it’s very safe and all, but I would want them to be more open-minded and to speak a few different languages,” he explains. “I almost think that when you go international, you don’t really go back.”