Wiscon 31: Third Culture Kids

[oyceter]

Description: Not everyone is born in one country and grows up there. Some are born in one country and then grow up in another, or several others; these are third culture kids. Often, they find themselves out of synch with both places. What is it like to a third culture kid and where can we find ourselves in sf/f? Is Temeraire of the Naomi Novik novels a third culture kid?

Panelists: Lawrence Schimel (desayunoencama) (mod), Alma Alexander, yhlee, me

This is going to be a rather sketchy write up, since I didn't take notes. Also, it will probably be rather self-centered because I remember what I said best, heh.

Lawrence was the mod, but he was coming from a reading in a non-Concourse building, so the panel started a little late. Also, he had only found out he was the moderator a couple of hours beforehand! Alma Alexander, Yoon and me sort of stared at each other for a bit before deciding that maybe we should introduce ourselves. Thankfully, Lawrence ran in a bit after the introductions and saved us from more aimless staring.

Alexander said she was born in Yugoslavia but grew up in various countries in Africa and got her education in the UK and South Africa. Yoon said she was born in the States and alternately moved between the US and Korea several times. I said I was born in the States and then moved to Taiwan when I was 8 or 9. Lawrence said that he was not really a third culture kid, but more a third culture adult, having moved to Spain a while back.

I interrupted the panel mid-discussion sometime to ask if people wanted a definition for TCKs; I figure it'll be useful for people reading this now to have it at the front. Third culture kids are generally defined as people who grew up in two or more cultures (and usually countries, so hyphenated Americans and etc. don't usually count). Growing up in two or more cultures generally means that they form a "third" (or fourth, or fifth, etc.) culture of their own. General traits tend to include a feeling of perpetual alienation and a more global perspective (at least, I hope so for the second).

I also defined the difference between immigrants and expats as: immigrants are viewed as moving "up" culturally while expats are viewed as moving "down" or across. Lawrence also mentioned that expats generally have the option to return or move back and forth between their adopted country and their chosen country, and that they have a different relationship with their adopted country than immigrants tend to. I think a lot of this (or all of this) has to do with class; expats have the resources to move about and to keep options open while immigrants don't. I add my usual disclaimer that I am defining immigrant vs. expat descriptively and not prescriptively; this is how I think the terms are consciously or unconsciously used.

Someone later (in conversation or in the panel, I can't remember) brought up refugees as well, who are usually perceived to be even lower on the class scale (though not always; my grandparents for example).

Lawrence began by asking us about language and how TCK-ness affected language. I think Alexander spoke many languages, though she said she still reverted back to her mother tongue (Serbo-Croatian? argh, I wish I took notes) when she was feeling particularly emotional. She also mentioned having to learn English in the schoolyard, being thrown into it and being forced to learn because kids would laugh at any mistake she made. Yoon said that she was most fluent in English, even though Korean was her first language. She also mentioned that now she had a kid, she realized that a lot of phrases like "Don't touch that" or "No" or etc. were actually in her head as Korean, since that's how she heard them as a child. I said pretty much the same re: English being my most fluent language, though Chinese was the language I learned first.

I don't think Yoon or I mentioned that we have horrible accents when speaking Korean or Chinese and that people in Korea and Taiwan can basically tell right off that we are not "native" to the country.

Lawrence talked about speaking Spanish and how he writes children's books in Spanish and adult books in English, which I thought was interesting. He also spoke a bit about truly bilingual books and the scarcity of them -- not books with the same text in two languages side by side, but books that assumed that the reader knew both languages and switched between them midphrase. He also talked about a book written in Catalan in which all the narrative was in Catalan, but the actual dialogue was in Spanish, because it was illegal to speak Catalan in the time period the book was set in. (So cool! I wish I knew Spanish and Catalan so I could read that!)

Lawrence asked us about any other languages we had picked up; Yoon mentioned she had French and German and that she had this interesting category with (English?) and (Korean?) vs. (German?) and (French?), such that she'd substitute words within categories but not across categories. I have her categories completely wrong because I didn't take notes. I don't think I talked about Japanese and how I would forever mix stuff up with Japanese and Chinese, largely because of the kanji. Alexander talked about slipping between multiple languages and how people would stare when she talked on the phone and just inserted random English words or phrases midstream (my college roommates always found my conversations with my mom hysterical because of this as well). I think we all agreed that we talked mixed languages, forever forgetting one word in the language we were speaking in and knowing it in another.

Somehow we got to schooling and how that worked; Alexander talked about her parents looking for very rigorous schools for her to match her education in her original country, which is how she ended up in Africa (I don't remember what country, sigh) in a German convent school, despite not being German or Catholic. Yoon mentioned her international school and being able to socialize with lots of other TCKs. I talked about my school and how completely weird it was; it was set up by the government as a magnet school for children of tech industry businessmen, government workers and tech professors at the local universities in order to lure expats and immigrants back to Taiwan. So I also got to grow up with lots of other TCKs, most of whom had similar stories as mine. This helped me a lot; I wasn't the only TCK I knew.

At one point, we talked about survival strategies. Alexander said that hers was camouflage, attempting to learn the culture she was in as quickly as possible. I said that I tried camouflage, but because I'm Asian, camouflage was pretty much impossible in the US. So I went the exact opposite route and sort of shoved my TCK-ness and foreign-ness in people's faces (my general answer to "Do you remember such-and-such pop culture artifact?" tends to be "I grew up in Taiwan; we didn't have that there"). Lawrence then asked if we thought race had a large impact; Yoon and I both emphatically answered, "YES!" I don't think we got a chance to go into it more though.

Lawrence then asked us how TCK-ness impacted our writing. Yoon said something about realizing in high school that she only had Eurofantasies in her head and why was that? And she mentioned how she was trying more now to incorporate Korean culture, despite always feeling like she wasn't authentic enough to do so. (I think around this point, someone in the audience asked about her own story, but this is something I want to go into more depth later.) Um. I can't remember what Alexander said.

Around the end, we starting talking about US culture as being the global default culture; I mentioned businesspeople meeting and generally ending up having discussion in English, even when there aren't any Americans or British involved. There was a general sense of resentment (I think) among the panelists; I know I still feel that resentment at the unspoken assumption that people will know US culture and that people should bend around US culture. Lawrence talked about the power pyramid and how the white, American, middle-class male was at the top of the power pyramid globally.

We then ran out of time before we could talk about TCKs in fiction much, alas.

And now I go into the audience, which is when the discussion veered a bit into the territory of cultural appropriation. There was one member of the audience who identified herself as a Muslim Arab-American queer woman. She asked us about authenticity and talked about feeling like she shouldn't write her story about a person of color (I think it was an Arab-American, but I don't remember). She also talked about feeling like she didn't have permission and how she was also afraid that her words might be taken out of context to condemn other Muslims or other Arab-Americans, especially given today's political climate. This, by the way, was spread out through the session in several questions.

When she first talked, I think the panel generally mentioned that she should write about these things, and that her voice was needed. I think this is when Lawrence first introduced the power pyramid and said that it was far easier to write up the power pyramid than to write down, since writing up means being conversant in the dominant culture, which people generally are, since it's the dominant culture. I vaguely remember the panel also talking about the problems in writing down the power pyramid and having to be more cautious there, but that was more in general, since the woman talking clearly was not at the top of the power pyramid.

When she brought it up again, one (white) woman in the audience very loudly said something like, "You don't need permission! Write what you want! Look, if you need permission, I grant you permission! And don't worry about what other people will say; it doesn't matter, and if people criticize, well, screw them!"

Which I had many, many problems with, particularly the inherent privilege involved in being able to say those things, and the inherent privilege in "I grant you permission."

I tried to address it by saying that not needing permission was oversimplifying the very complicated matter. And I tried to talk to the first woman in the audience and to say that she had very real concerns, and that given politics being what they were, she very well might be taken up as a spokesperson for an entire culture, or her words could be used against people, and that it was all very complicated and that these were good things to think about. And that they were things that wouldn't just go away. I also tried to address the white woman in the audience by saying that if you were writing down the power pyramid (which, again, I don't think the first woman was), ignoring the political and historical climate you were writing in could be done, but that it was a privilege to ignore it. And that if people did criticize your portrayal of a minority culture, the response shouldn't be to not listen, but to take their criticism into account. You could then decide that it wasn't applicable, but you should at least listen, particularly for something as fraught as cultural appropriation.

I'm not sure if any of this ended up being coherent, and I apologized to the first woman later, because she seemed to be very frustrated by having her concerns glossed over.

Comments

[oyceter]

Yeah, it would have been nice if we had talked more about TCKs in fiction. My current theory is that Temeraire from Naomi Novik's books is a sort of TCK.

I am still somewhat amazed at how much white privilege was at the con, even though I probably shouldn't be.