Plumbing the hivemind!

[oyceter]

1) So... does anyone have examples of sf/f books with third-culture kids, or anything resembling a third-culture kid?

A third-culture kid is basically someone who is born into one culture, raised in another, and then returns to the first culture or moves on to different cultures, thereby creating a "third culture" that is a mixture of the first two. Or something. The difference between a third-culture kid and an immigrant seems to be that last step of returning to the "original" culture and finding it foreign as well.

My one example so far is Temeraire, and that's a sort-of example.

2) Also, any examples of movies in which a white man goes into a non-white culture and saves it or somehow one-ups it? Or basically, movies set in non-white civilizations that still end up focusing on the white guy.

My current list:
- Last Samurai
- Dances with Wolves
- Kingdom of Heaven
- Glory
- Cry Freedom
- Blood Diamond
- Constant Gardener
- Geronimo
- The Last King of Scotland (critique + example of trope? Haven't seen it)
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (from current casting reports)
- Wind Talkers

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

(1) is the Narnia books; most of the Pevenseys are never quite at home in the world again.

[oyceter]

Oh, duh, of course! I never thought of them that way, but it's so obvious!

[littlebutfierce]

Heh heh, picking brains for WisCon panels? :) I was going over the program today--so much good stuff!

[oyceter]

Argh, oops. The last comment was supposed to be to the Narnia comment above.

But um, yes. LJ knows all!

I am now rabidly watching movies and attempting to take notes.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

The Emerald Forest is almost an example of both: Based on a true story, Powers Boothe plays an American dam engineer in Brazil. Boothe's son (played by Charlie Boorman - son of director John Boorman) is kidnapped by a rain forest tribe, and raised as one of their own. Boothe continues to look for him and after many trials and adventures, stumbles upon him.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

Along the same lines, Tarzan is another case of both.

[the_rck]

For #2, I think Little Big Man might qualify. This is based on my memory of my father's long plot summary (which made me decide never to see it).

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

There's also a sequel, The Return of Little Big Man (which I don't think was ever made into a film).

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

1) Jeff Kerwin in The Bloody Sun. Maureen McHugh's Mission Child.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

And also Magdalene/Margali from The Shattered Chain and Thendara House. Pretty much.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

1) Possibly Karin Lowachee's Warchild, though a) got bored, didn't finish, b) I'm not sure the protagonist gets back to his original culture till book two, if there is a book two.

Possibly Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic books, though any returning to the original culture is spread through many books.

Possibly Robert Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, no, really. Well, read it and see if you agree. (Oyce annoyance factor: Pro: depicts tough, capable women. Con: They all turn out to be dying to lay down their weapons and have babies.) Actually, several Heinlein books deal with people going to a new culture (often one they partially create), becoming part of it, then returning home and feeling like home os totally alien to them. See also Time Enough for the Stars, Farmer in the Sky, Have Spacesuit Will Travel.

2) Haven't seen it, but perhaps Shogun?

[kate_nepveu]

I was thinking about Pierce's books, but I don't think in any of the Circle books, the kids actually go *back*. Daja and Briar have brushes with their original culture, but they end up sticking with their new one.

Arguably Kel does in the *winces at the name* Protector of the Small quartet, in the Tortall universe, but that raises the whole problem of wholesale importing Japan into a generic medievaloid world . . .

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

What these people need is a honky, old-school: Shogun (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080274/).

[oyceter]

Oh, dude, yes. *rolls eyes*

There is probably a whole paper to be written about the shift from Shogun to Last Samurai.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

A number of characters in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire are well on their way to becoming third-culture kids, should they survive that long.

[kate_nepveu]

should they survive that long

. . . no bet.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Rudyard Kipling's Kim is both one and two! It's worth reading, the physical details of India are right on.

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

Books: Takeo from the Tales of the Otori series.

Movies: The Magnificent Seven.

Is is bad of me to want to offer up the Ewoks in RotJ as a counter-example to your movie list?

[oyceter]

I don't know if the Ewoks are a counter-example, though... they're portrayed as a more primitive culture who needs the help of Leia and Han to defend themselves. And while they overthrow the Empire, the main focus is still on the white characters going in to help them, as opposed to the Ewoks themselves, who are largely incomprehensible and not-very-individual.

Er, unless I'm reading you wrong for a counter-example?

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

Oh! here is something that fits *both* genres! Although it is embarassing to admit having read it (I was young and had no taste): Clan of the Cave Bear & sequels.

And, for the third-culture one, Dune? (It has been decades since I read it, but the general plot-shape seems to be what you're looking for.) Also: Harry Potter? Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series might count eventually, but Brust hasn't actually *shown* us the part where he visited the Easterner lands.

I can think of a few other examples of characters living in a different culture, then returning to their culture-of-origin and feeling like they don't belong, but they don't have the "growing up" aspect you're looking for.

[oyceter]

Dune! Although from what I gather, Paul doesn't really return that much to his original culture? Unless you are talking about Alia!

[rilina.livejournal.com]

1) Harry Potter and Cor in C. S. Lewis's _The Horse and His Boy_ (which is problematic for so very many reasons) should be examples, but they don't really work because they're both raised in ignorance. But possibly relevant to your discussion? They both have to a certain degree an idea of the return as homecoming, or the return as something somewhat idealized, which I am not very comfortable with. Perhaps also in this category: Candy Quackenbush in the Abarat books.

2) These are probably borderline, but possibly still relevant to any discussion: South Pacific; Lost in Translation; Lawrence of Arabia.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

1) I was thinking of HP the other way 'round: he starts in mundane culture, then moves to the wizard culture, and returns to the mundane culture to find himself even more out-of-place than he previously had been.

movies Now With White People

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Seven Years in Tibet, from all reports (note: have not seen it myself).

Amistad. An unusually well-done and historically accurate one of those, but still one of those.

The whole set of works dealing with Anna and the King of Siam-- the original musical The King And I, the movie, the later Anna and the King.

The recent The Painted Veil, in which a nasty cholera academic is the Disturbing Backdrop to the white medicine-providing protagonists' marital problems.

The friend I am sitting with (thespooniest) said he feels the treatment of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi to be an extension of this syndrome, for lo, they cannot possibly do anything without Our Heroes and their purpose is to be cute/cuddly/exotic/helpful.

Re: movies Now With White People

[oyceter]

No way! They did it to Amistad too?!

I didn't go see The Painted Veil because I was afraid it would be exactly what you describe.

I also agree with thespooniest re: the Ewoks... they and their entire culture play second fiddle to Han and Leia.

[tyreseus.livejournal.com]

Mercedes Lackey's Dragon Jouster series (Joust, Alta, Sanctuary, Aerie) is almost exactly what you're describing. Vetch (aka Kiron in later books), an Altan slave captured as a child, is raised in the Tian dragon's compound in the first book. In the second, Vetch returns to Alta and finds it more than foreign. In the third, he and the other jousters discover and revitalize a third culture long since forgotten. The cultures are modelled on Middle Eastern climates and as the series progress they start to discover common elements that used to unite Tia and Alta, but they have distinct taboos and religious prejudices.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy.

Possibly Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter.

[kintail.livejournal.com]

1) Definitely The King Must Die by Mary Renault, a fantasy retelling of myths surrounding Theseus (and Ariadne and the Minotaur) and the bull-leapers of Crete.

Relevant parts: Theseus and a group of thirteen other teenagers is taken from Athens and Eleusis to Crete to become bull-dancers. To survive, they embrace their fate and become very very good bull-dancers, with the side-effect of becoming very immersed in the culture. Many years later, most of them return home, and do not feel they fit in at all, and are not exactly welcomed by the families who had thought them dead, because they had changed in such "scandalous" ways.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Perhaps her The Persian Boy, too? Bagoas is taken from his old-style Persian upbringing at ten, and by thirteen has to adapt to the Persian court culture, and from sixteen, to the far different Macedonian culture (and ends up finally in early Hellenistic Egypt) - there are several places in the book where he thinks about the various cultures he's lived in in terms of the ones he now lives in, and he also discusses how both his and Alexander's cultural viewpoints change as they come to know each other.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Diana Wynne Jones, The Homeward Bounders. Feel that some of her others would count too, but too soon after first coffee of the day.

[shewhohashope.livejournal.com]

I love that book!

Also from DWJ, I think Millie/The Goddess - from the Lives of Christopher Chant' - counts.

[estara.livejournal.com]

2) For this I found The Man who would be King - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073341/

But then again both of those British guys have a tragic end, so I guess the one-upmanship doesn't count? But it's definitely about the white guys.

1) Hah, I couldn't think of one in the real world, but the Poison Study/ Magic Study fantasies (Maria V. Snyder)have that as a background as the girl protagonist got kidnapped as a small child and raised in a completely different culture, which she is forced to return to in the second book. There's also a really strange female character with a major psychological problem of being female in there. It's a Luna Book, but the romance is definitely not the main point. Motifs of estrangement and finding a place are. I'm eagerly awaiting a third book, which I hope will be written.

[snarp]

1)

- Delan from Delan the Mislaid, by Laurie Marks, and also sort-of-kind-of the protagonist from The Watcher's Mask
- Firekeeper from Jane Lindskold's series that starts with Through Wolf's Eyes
- the reindeer from The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce (these animal books seem problematic to me, somehow...)
- Jame from the P. C. Hodgell's series that starts with Dark of the Moon; she returns to her own original culture at the end of the second book
- probably Hagan and Cloud from Julian May's Galactic Milieu/Pliocene Exile series(es), but they're very minor characters, if I remember correctly.
- probably Rook from Song for the Basilisk, by Patricia A. McKillip. (The characters from Alphabet of Thorn and Ombria in Shadow don't quite return, so I can't count them.)
- possibly Akin from Adulthood Rites, by Octavia Butler
- possibly Mark from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series

2) I have found a serious context in which it is appropriate to mention Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III! Ha! My day is awesome now!

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Last King of Scotland attempted to debunk this story type, but for me still fell into the trap of not doing enough to make the African characters three-dimensional. But other people's mileage varied.

[shewhohashope.livejournal.com]

According to wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge:

"Sociologist David Pollock describes a TCK as "a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership of any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of a similar background." In order to be a TCK, one must accompany their parents into a foreign culture. Entering another culture without one's parents, such as on a foreign exchange program, explicitly does not make one a TCK."

I read 'River of Gods' by Ian McDonald a few weeks ago. The book was sold to me as 'Indian cyber-punk'.

Two of the narrators possibly fit the bill:

Najia: born in Afghanistan, raised in Sweden and now in India, but planning to return to Afghanistan.

Vishram: doesn't count according to wikipedia but he was born in India, studied and lived in the UK and feels displaced when he returns to India.

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting that definition. I've just been hit with the cluephone that both my partner and I are TCKs, too. Huh!

[oracne.livejournal.com]

All my examples got said already, but I did have a thought about "Wind Talkers" being an interesting example because it was directed by John Woo, of Asian action flick fame. The movie seemed to me to be a deliberate homage to older big budget WWII films--maybe "Sands of Iwo Jima" with John Wayne, because Wayne's character is killed in that movie, as Nicolas Cage's is in "Wind Talkers." I find it interesting that Woo made the choices he did.

Cage was the biggest star in the movie, but I think it's really about Adam Beach's character; it ends with him.

Another interesting bit: at one point, Adam Beach (Yahzee, I think?) pretends to be Japanese as a ruse in the midst of battle, and it works.

[chomiji]

Oliver (the oldest boy) in Joy Chant's Red Moon, Black Mountain, who becomes immersed in a fantasy world's horse nomad culture, then runs into his younger borther and sister, who have ended up in a quasi-Gondorian culture in the same world, and then they all go home (20th c USA) again.

Woman Coming Home (neé North Owl, a/k/a Ayatyu and Stone Telling) in Le Guin's Always Coming Home, who goes to live with her father's warrior people as a young teen and returns home to her own farming people as a young mother.

- Cho

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

A couple of other posters have mentioned Shogun. While the miniseries may indeed fit your category #2 (I haven't seen it since it first aired and my memories are vague), I just reread the novel last week and I wouldn't put it in the same class as Last Samurai or (horrors!) Dances with Wolves. Yeah, the English pilot Blackthorne is a central figure and a catalyst for much of the action, but the Japanese characters (including, notably, the women) are equally well-developed, and the real one-up champion of the story is the would-be Shogun, Toranaga.

[oyceter]

Yeah, the English pilot Blackthorne is a central figure and a catalyst for much of the action, but the Japanese characters (including, notably, the women) are equally well-developed, and the real one-up champion of the story is the would-be Shogun, Toranaga.

Well, I think the big tipping point is the first part -- despite the fact that the book is purportedly about Toranaga and Japanese politics, a good deal of it is on Blackthorne and how he deals with Japanese culture and defends the shogun-to-be and etc. It feels like Clavell's personal wish fulfillment, complete with getting the girl, who is handily Christian and speaks Latin.

And the final thing that tips me over is Clavell's unexamined Orientalism.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

I just thought of (most likely) the oldest "third culture" story in history: Moses, born to a Jewish woman, placed in a basket in a river, raised by the Phaeroh's daughter, returns to the Jews to lead them out of captivity. It makes for an interesting way to read Exodus.

[shewhohashope.livejournal.com]

Joseph/Yusuf (as in 'and the technicolour dream-coat') came before Moses.

Although I read the Qur'an (specifically, the surah-al-Yusuf) rather than the Bible/Torah so i'm not sure what differences there may be. I really should get around to reading those though.