[00:00:01] Speaker A: We know too much of Japan to be feeling like the average American or British or whatever. And then we also knew the opposite with you. And Japan would never accept us for being a full Japanese person.
We really have no place to go. And then we would laugh. So where are we supposed to go? Hawaii.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Hello, this is Joseph Scholz and welcome to the Deep Culture Experience where we explore the psychology of intercultural understanding. And I am here with Ishi Terai. So happy to be recording with you. We are recording in Tokyo, but we just got back from three weeks in West Bengal, India, where we visited your father's ancestral village.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: Hi, Joseph. Yes, indeed. I am still digesting our intense experiences in India. It was a different world from Tokyo, wasn't it? And talking of different cultural worlds, the title of today's episode is Third Culture Kids Superheroes or Lost Toys.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: And we're going to talk about what it's like growing up as a Third Culture kid, or tck, as people sometimes say.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: This term Third Culture kid refers to people who grow up between cultures. For example, children of expatriates living abroad who go to an international school or maybe move between different countries growing up.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: And this idea of third culture refers to the betweenness of not being completely local, but also not sharing completely in their parents culture.
[00:01:50] Speaker C: And what interests me about this is how psychologically powerful it is to grow up between cultures. It can impact your identity in deep ways. It can feel really good, like a superpower. You're a chameleon who can blend in anywhere you see things others don't see.
But it can also be difficult. And you can feel like a lost toy. You don't know where home is.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: And this isn't just true for third Culture Kids. Foreign experiences have a big psychological impact on all of us.
So the story of Third Culture Kids is part of a larger story of being a cultural bridge person.
[00:02:34] Speaker C: And so today in part one, we will hear where the term Third Culture Kid comes from, which in fact takes us back to India.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: In part two, we'll hear the stories of three Third Culture kids, each at different places in their intercultural journey, but all sharing some common challenges.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: And in part three, we'll dig into a basic question.
Why is growing up between cultures so psychologically powerful?
We'll see that it shapes cognitive function at a deep level, what cultural psychologists call one's construal of self.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: And we'll hear some advice for anyone who's not quite sure what to do with their superpower.
[00:03:22] Speaker C: And that brings us to part one. Who is Ruth Hill USIM.
So the term third culture kids was created by the sociologist Ruth Hill usim way back in the 1950s.
And this story is particularly interesting for me because it starts in the city of Hyderabad.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Now you went to graduate school in Hyderabad, right?
[00:03:59] Speaker C: Yes, I did.
And today if you say Hyderabad, people think tech and innovation.
In the early naughts it was called Cyberabad.
But Ruth Hill Oseem was living there before all of this.
Just after India gained independence in 1947, India was starting to modernize. Hussim and her husband were sociologists from the University of Michigan studying social change.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: And at the time, India was still quite underdeveloped.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: Very four out of five people could not read.
But Hyderabad was the hub of modernization.
It attracted expatriate experts and an English educated Indian elite worked alongside them.
So Usim and her husband were researching things like how does a traditional society modernize, how do institutions adapt, how do foreign experts and local elites work together?
[00:05:08] Speaker B: But that's not what Usim is remembered for today.
[00:05:13] Speaker C: No. The story goes that she and her husband were raising three school aged children and they noticed something odd about their own children and the children of other foreign families.
These children had American passports, their parents were American, they spoke English at home, but they didn't seem to feel completely American. Their first culture.
But they didn't identify entirely with the Indian culture either, which was their second second culture.
Instead, they bonded in a unique way with each other. They seemed to develop a third culture.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: And that's how she came up with the term third culture kids.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: And she noticed that this third culture seemed to form spontaneously as they interacted with each other. The children were giving birth to their own hybrid culture.
For example, they would use English, but maybe mix in Telugu, the local language, and Urdu, the language of the educated elite.
And this mix of languages and customs was their native culture.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: So in this case, what do you mean by native?
[00:06:45] Speaker C: Well, it's native in terms of their cognitive development.
Because the environment we are raised in shapes our psychology, how we relate to others, our sense of self. And we'll come back to that in part three.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Well, I am really interested in how this relates to human evolution because humans evolved to be highly sensitive to their peer groups. And navigating your peer group is really important for survival. Your peers are the ones that you'll be hunting with, for example, or that you will compete for a mate with.
[00:07:20] Speaker C: And so these kids bond with each other, growing up differently from their parents, differently from the local children.
They develop their own culture.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: We can call it a Between culture culture navigating different cultural worlds is natural to them. And so Ruth Hill Usim noticed things that made these third culture kids special.
They were very adaptable. They would switch between languages depending on the situation. They were comfortable with cultural difference and they really bonded with each other in a strong way.
[00:07:58] Speaker C: And now fast forward three quarters of a century, we have lots of people growing up in a way that's similar to Ruth Hill usim's kids. She really spotted a future trend.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Well, these days Ruth Hill Lucim is not that well known even by third culture kids.
People are more familiar with the work of David Pollock and Ruth Van Recken.
They picked up on Ruth Hill Hoosim's ideas. They wrote an influential book, Third culture Kids Growing up among Worlds. And they put third culture kids on the map, so to speak.
[00:08:33] Speaker C: And David Pollock was an educator. He spent his career working in international schools.
He did student guidance.
And Ruth Van Ruken grew up as a child of missionaries, lived in an international context and together they studied third culture kids.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: So let's talk about what David Pollack and Ruth Van Recken learned.
Let's start with their definition.
A third culture kid is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents culture.
[00:09:09] Speaker C: And one thing they learned was that culture has a developmental impact.
Age is important.
If a family moves to a foreign country, the 10 year old child will have a very different experience than their 15 year old sibling.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: And they also understood that many people grow up between cultures but aren't the children of expatriates. For example, the children of immigrants often grow up between the family culture and the local culture.
So they refer more broadly to cross cultural kids, people who have meaningfully interacted with different cultural environments for a significant period of time during their childhood.
[00:09:52] Speaker C: And that's really what we are interested in here.
Anyone who grows up between cultures is going to be affected psychologically.
So to find out what that's like, we asked some third culture kids about their experiences.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: And that brings us to part two, who am I?
So we talk to three people about their experiences. Podcast team member Vanessa Eisenberg recently graduated from university. She is figuring out her place in the world as a third culture kid.
Also, podcast team member Hashine Madarasinge, She's a few more steps down the road of life. And finally my good friend and colleague Robert Murphy, who has spent many years finding his place in the world as a third culture kid.
[00:10:52] Speaker C: And one of the most common things that third culture kids experience is questions about their identity where home is, how to fit in.
So let's hear how it was for Vanessa.
[00:11:09] Speaker D: I'm half Chinese and half English.
I was born in Tokyo and raised in Singapore, attended university in England for three years and Tokyo for one year.
My parents were born and raised in England, but have been living in Asia for the last 30 years, with no plans to move back.
Growing up since Singapore was my home, so it confused me when my parents referred to our yearly trips to London as going home.
But because my British International School classmates planned to move to England for university, I never questioned that I would do the same.
The transition to living in England was smooth. Despite never having lived there before, I realised how much of my life in Singapore was in an international bubble.
When asked about government policy or Singapore's history, I felt completely ignorant.
There was a Singapore society at my university, but I was too shy to join.
I would have felt like an imposter. What did I really know about being Singaporean? Was England my home? After all?
Being a TCK makes it easier to understand others, but can make it harder to be understood.
In England, I wanted to share different parts of myself, but didn't want to come across as too foreign.
At university in Tokyo, a student asked me where I was from.
I hesitated, unsure of how much to share.
It's not a difficult question, he said.
I told him that it was complicated and he said, well, it's where you were born.
I was born in Tokyo, but I'm not Japanese. I told him that seemed to make him a bit uncomfortable.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: I was really struck by Vanessa's reaction to her parents saying that they were going, quote, unquote, back home to England, because even though she spoke English at home, had a British passport, went to British International School, Singapore was home, and
[00:13:15] Speaker B: I felt a kind of contradiction. Vanessa says that the transition to living in England was smooth, but it did create uncertainty. She wanted to fit in. She questioned her Singaporean identity.
[00:13:30] Speaker C: But even if she wanted to identify as British, she cannot unexperience growing up in Singapore, and people she meets in the UK won't be able to relate to that. So there's always some path that's left out.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: But Hashini had the opposite experience, moving from Sri Lanka to Italy as a child through her into a cultural environment that could be harsh and that also affected her identity.
Let's take a listen.
[00:14:05] Speaker D: Growing up between cultures, I have struggled with the feeling of not fully belonging anywhere, as if my existence constantly needs explanation.
I was a preteen when my family moved to Italy, and that's a Very fragile time for identity development.
It was overwhelming to come from a developing country and grew up in a so called first world country.
I was often in the minority.
Since I grew up in Italy, I speak Italian fluently and I feel a genuine connection to the culture.
Yet I am often still seen as a foreigner.
Racism and discrimination, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, has been part of everyday life.
Sometimes I sabotaged myself and intentionally didn't fit in.
If I distanced myself first, I couldn't be excluded.
I have also felt an internal pressure to identify with one culture and one culture only, as though choosing one would make things simpler, make me more recognized.
It isn't necessarily about being authentic.
I just wanted clarity for myself.
There are also rewards to this betweenness.
I've had the opportunity to move between different social worlds.
I've developed connections to more than one place, more than one way of seeing the world, and I deeply value that.
Reconnecting with Sri Lanka has felt especially meaningful.
Going back the last time was one of the best experiences of my life.
I felt I was reclaiming a part of myself. Rather than choosing between worlds.
I've slowly become more comfortable identifying with more than one culture without ranking them or choosing between them.
When people ask where I'm from, I often say I'm originally Sri Lankan, but I grew up in Italy.
Recently, though, I've been questioning that. But why do I say, but I grew up in Italy?
Why does one part have to justify the other?
Not all my third culture friends struggle the way I have.
For someone who does, I would simply say learning to be okay with holding multiple identities is a process.
It's okay if it takes time, and it's okay to feel like you belong to more than one place.
[00:17:12] Speaker C: Wow. I really feel for Hashini. As a child, you have no choice. You simply have to adjust.
And then to be seen as an outsider, to not be accepted, even though you speak the language perfectly, that's really tough.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Well, her story brings out something that I think a lot of third culture kids feel, a kind of inner conflict.
And of course, she's talking about sabotaging herself by intentionally not fitting in, and that's heartbreaking.
[00:17:44] Speaker C: But then she values this ability to connect to people in different places. That's the superpower, right? You know that there are other worlds out there.
You can see things from different perspectives.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: And both Hashini and Vanessa talked about being asked, where are you from?
It is such a simple question, and people might think, well, that's no big deal.
But that question can touch a very sensitive spot in your Heart.
[00:18:16] Speaker C: Well, it's really great that Hashini has found meaningful connection in Sri Lanka, and she is more comfortable now with her identity, but it still sounds like a work in progress.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: And speaking of being comfortable with one's identity, you and I had a conversation with Robert Murphy, who I've known for years.
He grew up between the United States and Japan. His mother was Japanese and his father Irish Italian.
He went to an international school, and he also bonded with his classmates.
[00:18:52] Speaker C: Robert is older, and he has found a place for himself as a third culture kid.
But it's clear that it was not easy for him either.
Early on, he was sent to a Saturday school to study Japanese while living in New York, which Robert refers to as J School.
Let's hear about his experience there.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: Well, I was. I was born in Brooklyn. My mother was Japanese, father Irish Italian.
On Saturdays only, I went to J School. But this school was created for kids that were only meant to be in New York for two or three years. So basically they had the foundations of being a Japanese person in that sort of situation. I was very lost, and so it was very difficult for me.
The first year, I was put in a special ed classroom in this J school, and then we had maybe five or six other kids in there. I was the only person that was there because of the language gap, the cultural gap. Obviously, that was a great idea. And in fact, I liked the teacher so much because the teacher had such great techniques. It was just fantastic attention. I didn't want to leave that class. But after one year, she said, no, no, no, you're ready for the normal kid class. So then I was kind of crying, and then I was thrown into the normal kid class, but two years younger than my actual age. But even that was too difficult for me. From then on, I didn't like going to J school. And then at 10, my father just announces that, okay, we're moving to Japan. And that was a big shock for me. I didn't want to leave my everything, basically right? But then we moved to Kobe. I went and started at an international school.
It was Kansai dialect, which was different from the Kyushu dialect my mother was using and very different from the standard Japanese that we had been learning in J school.
But after six months of that, I kind of acclimated into the Kansai way of doing things. And then I was speaking in the Kansai dialect.
But then, so at 11th grade, right, just before senior year, again, my father announced, oh, we got to go back to the States.
And it's like, hey, look, I didn't want to come here in the first place. And then now, what are you doing? You're pulling me back. I was just thrown into a public school in LA for 12th grade, which, again, I really didn't like.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Wow. Robert was put in a special education class because he couldn't keep up with the other students in his Saturday Japanese class. That's a lot of pressure.
[00:21:42] Speaker C: But it really broke my heart to hear that he cried when he had to leave.
Then at 10, his family moved to Japan, which he didn't want to do.
And then seven years later, after he has settled in the same thing, we are leaving Japan.
And this feeling of simply having to go along, that's really not easy.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: I think this is one reason that third culture kids in particular bond so closely with each other. They have shared this experience of navigating these different worlds.
And Robert experienced that bonding at his international school.
Let's listen.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: I was there for a total of seven years. We're living in Japan so long that we at least felt partially Japanese.
We had this weird language that we came up with, and we. We felt native in that.
And then when new kids came and tried to mimic what we were saying, we. We could point out that, oh, that kid doesn't really know how to speak the way we speak. And then it became so natural for us to use this sort of hybrid language that we had. It was Japanese mixed in with English, and we would code switch.
It kind of makes me feel like a war veteran or something. But the people that I went to international school with, when we connect, there's a funny bond. There's a funny thing that we click.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Well, this really sounds just like what Ruth Hill Usim described all those years ago with the kids in Hyderabad.
[00:23:33] Speaker C: But what really hit me hard was when he said, it kind of makes me feel like a war veteran or something.
His international school classmates are like fellow soldiers.
Like they have bonded through shared trauma.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: And I will bet that his parents really didn't understand what that was like for him. I mean, how could they?
So in the end, your schoolmates are your tribe, and they are the ones who really understand what you're going through.
[00:24:05] Speaker C: And we asked Robert about that specifically how these experiences have affected his identity.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: I remember thinking about these things when I was at international school. I guess a bunch of us used to do that all the time. So I was lost. I was just like a jellyfish floating around. I remember my friends being lost when we were 16 or 17 to say, look, we're not American. We're not Japanese. We know too much of Japan to be feeling like the average American or British or whatever. And then we also knew the opposite were true. And Japan would never accept us for being a full Japanese person. We really have no place to go. And then we would laugh. So where do we. Where are supposed to go? Hawaii.
And then, you know, that that was our kind of metaphorical answer, but it also actually kind of made sense too. Hawaii is a hybrid kind of place, so we weren't that off in with that. Jo.
[00:25:12] Speaker C: I continue to feel moved by Robert's experiences. I imagine him and his friends having these conversations like the tribe of lost toys.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Well, the image that sticks in my mind is the jellyfish floating along, just doing the best you can, but not really being in control.
[00:25:33] Speaker C: But Robert did find a place for himself after leaving Japan. He lived in the US and went to school there, but didn't really fit in.
Then he found an opportunity to come back and work in Japan.
He was hired because of his language and cultural skills, but he had trouble adjusting there too.
And then finally things started to come together.
Let's listen how it was for him.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: I went to Tokyo thinking it'd be great, and that didn't work out. I kind of, you know, migrated to here where the rest of my family is. That was the only other choice. I didn't want to go back to la. In New York would have been impossible. I had no connections at the time. The connections were lost. So then, yeah, I was here. But then after a few months, I landed the job at the Board of Education.
And after four years of that, and then I started my own school.
And I was able to start my own school with over 100 students because of all the teaching that I had done across those four years. I've been in this small town of 20,000 people for more than 30 years, and the school has my name on the door. And junior high school kids that I taught 30 years ago when I was working for the Department of Education, they. They now have their own kids and they're sending. Some of them are sending them to our school down here.
And so I'm kind of an established person within this very small community. Naturally, I guess in a way, it's the people around me are kind of adjusting to me more than I have to adjust to them. It's just like Murphy is in the town. And that's just the way it is.
[00:27:26] Speaker C: It makes me super happy that Robert really found a place for himself, a way to use his superpower.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Well, then it strikes me that he Went from floating to being very intentional. You know, he was building his school and his career.
[00:27:42] Speaker C: And as a cross culture kid, you often have no choice.
And the answer to that is to make choices, fine things to care about.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Can I just also say that I love how Robert has reconciled himself to not completely fitting in. He says people in his small town have adjusted to him. Oh, Murphy's in the town, and that's just the way it is. I love that.
[00:28:07] Speaker C: And that brings us to part three. Construal.
[00:28:17] Speaker D: Foreign.
[00:28:27] Speaker C: I have loved hearing these stories, but let's geek out a little bit and let's start with the question, why are these childhood experiences so powerful?
[00:28:42] Speaker B: So here's a quote from Sigmund Freud, perhaps the most influential psychologist in history.
The impressions of early childhood, though they may be forgotten, leave in the mind the deepest traces and exercise a determining influence upon the later development of the individual.
[00:29:04] Speaker C: And this idea that our experiences as children shape us psychologically for the rest of our lives was radical. At that time, Freud was interested in how our personality develops. But the way I see it, the psychological impact on third culture kids goes beyond personality. It shapes our construal of self.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: And when we say personality, we refer to the traits that make someone unique, like being an outgoing person or having a good sense of humor.
But the construal of self refers to how you experience the self and as it relates to the world around you.
And we're basing this primarily on the work of cultural psychologist Shinobu Kitayama, and
[00:29:54] Speaker C: let's quote his landmark 1991 article with Hazel Rose Marcus.
A construal of the self refers to the constellation of thoughts, feelings, and actions concerning one's relationship to others and the self as distinct from others.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: So this relates to how you experience your connection to other people, your social self.
Psychologists talk about, for example, an independent construal of self.
You experience the self as fundamentally separate from others, or an interdependent construal of self.
You experienced yourself like a node in a network.
[00:30:40] Speaker C: Like, growing up in India made me deeply interconnected with the people around me,
[00:30:46] Speaker B: whereas growing up in the US Like I did, gave me a feeling of self as fundamentally independent from others.
[00:30:54] Speaker C: And this is in some ways at least deeper than personality.
It's like our native language.
That experience of self is what lets us navigate the social world we grow up in.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: And so if you grow up as a third culture kid or a cross culture kid, you often have the need to shift between different construals of the self.
Different social selves to function in different environments.
[00:31:23] Speaker C: And I think that's why third culture kids often talk about being uncomfortable with questions like where are you from?
It can feel like you are not a single self.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: And this brings us to one final question. How can third culture kids, cross culture kids or any cultural bridge person turn this superpower into an advantage? Rather than just feeling lost, as we'll
[00:31:51] Speaker C: hear, Vanessa found that putting a label on her experience, finding out that she was not alone in feeling this way was extremely helpful.
Let's listen.
[00:32:07] Speaker D: I first discovered the term third culture kid in a book about the difficulty of growing up between worlds.
It touched me to know that other people felt like I did and gave me the vocabulary to explain my experience.
Now when I meet other tcks, I often feel a bubble of excitement to think that this person can see every part of me and understand that they all contributed to make me who I am.
Home can mean different things. I feel a rush of comfort and familiarity when arriving in Singapore, yet feel most at home around British people.
I also feel a connection to Japan, the country where I was born.
I've learned to accept these different facets of myself as I physically move between Singapore, England and Japan. As an adult, I try to approach life in each place with intention.
Identity is not passively determined by geography or family situation.
It can be created through the life choices we make.
[00:33:17] Speaker C: I love her use of the word intentionality.
We need to make intentional choices about the people and the places we care about. Invest in your choices. Don't accept that your identity is out of your control.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: And when we spoke to Robert, I really got a sense that this process of constructing a solid sense of self takes time.
So let's hear what his advice to third culture kids is.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: I was probably lost until around 30, mid-30s.
I didn't. Yeah, I was just jellyfish and I just playing with the cars that I was dealt.
I remarried in my mid-30s. I started my masters in my mid-30s.
Things started to make a lot of sense for me around that time.
But in my 20s, no, it's not easy. I don't want to sugarcoat it.
I know some people that maybe they're still lost. They haven't been able to break out of it properly and integrate or they haven't found the place that they should settle yet.
There is luck involved and finding people that will help you is going to be important.
You can't do it alone.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: I love Robert's honesty. He says I don't want to sugarcoat it and that some of his friends are still lost, but his point about finding others to help you is so true.
That's when your superpower feels like a bridge rather than making you into an
[00:35:04] Speaker C: island, and you have to make that effort. Your superpower is precious. It lets you connect and it also makes the world a better place.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: And so, on that optimistic note, that's all we have time for today.
So let's share some of our sources. We refer to the book Third Culture Kids Growing Up Among Worlds by David Pollock and Ruth Van Recken. There is a revised edition published in 2017 together with Michael Pollock. The quote from Freud came from the Interpretation of the dreams published in 1900. To learn more about the construal of self, definitely check out Hazel Rose Marcus and Shinobu Kitayama's 1991 article Culture and the Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.
[00:35:53] Speaker C: Also, if you are a TCK and looking to connect, there are online forums, NPOs, discussion groups, conferences.
Just do a website search or ask AI how to find TCK communities the
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Deep Culture Experience podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute, an NPO dedicated to intercultural education and research. I'm the director of jii. Are you looking for a community that shares your interest in learning deep cultural lessons? Then definitely check out jii's Deep Culture Approach Masterclass series. It is a blended learning community that digs into the psychology of intercultural understanding. Excellent. If you are an educator, just do a web search for the Japan Intercultural Institute.
[00:36:41] Speaker C: Also, please become a member of gii. Join our regular learning circles, our book club. Learn about our research.
We are an NPO and it costs very little to support what we do and connect with others.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: This podcast is completely non commercial. Help us out by sharing this episode on social media and you can get in
[email protected] A special thanks to our
[00:37:10] Speaker C: good friend Robert Murphy who so generously talked to us about his experiences, as well as podcast team members Vanessa Eisenberg and Hashini Madrasinghe.
Thanks also to the rest of the team, Sane Bozma, Leah Torhild, liana Haas, Karnes Emre 7, Yuto Aki, Albert Mangami, sound engineer Robinson Fritz, Jii's administrator, Ikumi Fritz and everyone at GII.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: And as always, thanks to you Ishita. It has been super fun doing this episode with you. I learned a lot.
[00:37:48] Speaker C: Thank you Joseph. It was really fun spending this time together.
