From the generation of global nomads/third culture kids (TCK) who grew up before the advent of the internet, reading through contemporary works by TCKs of younger generations has been eye-opening. I’d always been aware of the transformation of my own experience of relationships as communications technology changed, but I don’t think I’d realized that there might actually be different generations of global nomads – children who spent a significant amount of their developmental years outside of their passport country due to their parents’ professions – until I came across the word superdiversity in a recent master’s thesis by a TCK (Goana, 2017).
Superdiversity, as defined by Vertovec (2007), is “the diversification of diversity”. This term was coined to encompass the ways in which the world has transformed into one that is far beyond globalized. (Goana, 2017)
Where are you from?
TCK scholar Dr. Danau Tanu’s dissertation was the outcome of being asked “What makes you angry?” by a visiting professor to which she replied, “The question Where are you from?” She goes on to share the story of her parents and their own experiences of accumulating cultural capital. She calls it a generational project, and reading this forces me to reflect on my father’s childhood experiences, and possibly my father’s father’s as well, given my great grandfather was a stationmaster in the Indian railway system under the British Raj in the late 19th century – an occupation necessitating relocation. My grandfather designed and built sugar plants, relocating as necessary and I have photographic evidence of Papa as a two year old in Rangoon and we know his family was in Nepal in the late 1950s. Every single one of my father’s 9 brothers and sisters are born in a different town or city or post-colonial country as the case may be.
Is it any wonder that Papa was studying Japanese in the early 1960s and wandering around Europe making girlfriends until he was arranged to be married to my mother? He moved out of India to work in South East Asia at the beginning of the 1970s, and traveled abroad frequently on work until the early 1980s. It was he who made the decision that I would not be sent to my passport country of India after my O Levels to complete secondary schooling but instead be admitted to the other international school in Kuala Lumpur.
It is evident that my own transnational experiences are a result of the transnational engagements that began in previous generations in my family. (Tanu, 2013)
I am a Finn, I can claim that now without fear or embarrassment. I autonomously chose to move to and to settle down in Finland. I worked hard to earn my permanent residence as a self-employed entrepreneur, without the support of any barring my own professional and personal networks that facilitated my revenue streams necessary for meeting the immigration requirements. I moved here alone. My work was in Africa. Superdiversity describes my cultural identity far more than labels that rely on the colour of my skin, the ethnicity of my ancestors, or the mobility of my adult years.
My life experience, beginning in 1971, could be said to reflect the world’s own increasing globalization and the evolution of global communications systems and networks. Reading these works by women like me has made me recognize that what I take for granted is actually derived from an uncommon and often rare pool of experiences and knowledges. One thing that can be said about TCKs is that they are each of them diverse, and that TCK as a conceptual label is itself superdiverse; being made more so each day by scholarship that explores the bounds of the concept originally developed to refer to the experience of the West in the East or the Euro-centric meeting of the Other, etc.
I’ll tell you what I have learnt today. No amount of scholarship ON the experiences of a transnational childhood and education in the bubble of an international school in the context of a developing country particularly multicultural ones such as Malaysia, Singapore, or Indonesia in the ASEAN can transfer the knowing that comes from living the experience. I hear it in Tanu’s scholarly voice (2013; 2016) and in Goana’s master’s thesis (2017). There is a indefinable sophistication when bandying around concepts of culture and identity and ethnicity that can only emerge from having navigated them before one could spell them properly. Ultimately, it is not the scholars, but a person reflecting on their own life, who points out to us the unusual and uneven maturity and development of a TCK/global nomad childhood.
Like Tanu’s mother (2013 pg. 43-44), mine too grew up being exposed to the wider world and to novel things even though she did not move until we all did as a family. Her father traveled frequently both before and after World War 2, as a “gentleman” she said, getting overcoats and fedoras made for his steamer trunks on his steamship trips to London and New York. Somewhere in my uncle’s archives is a film reel of him and his colleagues visiting Niagara Falls in 1955. The year I spent with him alone as a child of 7 for complicated reasons while my parents were abroad is one of my seminal years – my first international solo trip was on a BOAC airliner in November 1972, also the year I got my first passport and my first fountain pen. It is my mother’s propensity for experimentation that introduced novel foods and experiences to us; related to her own experience of her father’s trips around the world bringing back novel things (a washing machine in 1947) and tastes (Swiss chocolates and fried mushrooms on toast for breakfast) to Calcutta.
One of the participants in a sequence of workshops we’re piloting at a community center in Helsinki is my mother’s age. When asked what advice from her own life experience would she give younger generations navigating massive change and systemic transformation, she said “You have to know from where you come”. Today, I see the truth of this. Our life skills and experiences are our resources and assets in times of great uncertainty and flux. This, then, is my inheritance from my parents and my parents’ parents before them – my cosmopolitan cultural capital, both that within my family of origin as well as my third culture kid upbringing.
“…similar pattern emerges in the data—the transnational engagements of previous generations in research participants’ families facilitated their own cosmopolitan dispositions. For example, parents made conscious decisions to increase their child’s exposure to cosmopolitan cultural capital (sometimes at great financial cost) such as to English-‐medium education. (Tanu, 2013)
Where am I from? Who am I?
An heir to multi-generational cosmopolitan cultural capital, first and foremost.
