A memory: I grew up in the Philippines during the 90s. Electricity was a regular annoyance. Brownouts happened frequently and for hours on end. I studied for my IGCSE English Lit exam by candlelight and accidentally lit my hair on fire.
When I was small, I grew up on a radio compound. Keeping the power on was essential for keeping international broadcasts going so we had generators.
When the power went off in the middle of the night, I would be the first to notice the sudden quietness, the vacuum of a thousand fans and air conditioners going out.
Whoosh.
When the lights go out in America, you hear screams, complaints. In the Philippines, silence. We’re all lying there wondering, ‘So will it come back on in one minute, five hours, or a day?’
I would walk with my father in the darkness downstairs to the laundry room to flip the switch for the generator. It was a big orange switch. Some nights, he had to walk to the generator building on the other side of the field. I waited in the darkness for him or walk with him through the dew covered grass. I wondered if there were snakes in the grass, as there often were poisonous snakes that snuck into the compound from the rice paddies. I ran over one with my bike once and watched it writhe to bite me.
Boom. Whoosh.
The emergency lights popped on. I liked the idea of being the one to bring light and electricity back like a child Prometheus.
A second memory: When I moved to America, my family lived in my grandparents’ house in a small village in the Minnesota countryside. I went from a megacity of 28 million to village of less than one thousand. I knew no one.
So one day I up and walked out of the house in front of my parents. I was barefoot. I walked a few miles to a bridge over a river. I was considering jumping but did not for two reasons: the drop was not far enough to kill me and I feared that if I drowned my parents might bury me in America.
Yeah, the horrifying dread of being buried in America kept me from jumping.
I decided instead to sit by the river and recite every poem and Bible verse I had memorised. I started with the Book of James and lost track somewhere in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
So I sat and ‘blue screen of death-ed’.
A few hours later, the sun was going done and I decided I was going to walk to Canada or at least walk away. I did not get very far. My dad came along in a car and sternly talked me into sitting down near the river again.
He tried to chat but all I remember is that he opened with, 'Have you prayed to God recently?'
I remember being absolutely furious when he asked that.
I wanted to retort, 'Yeah, because if you haven’t noticed there is no one around here to talk to about anything because you raised me not to gossip. So yes, I have talked to God because he’s the only one around.'
Instead, I said, 'Yeah'.
I do not remember the rest of our conversation. I think in that moment I realised the disconnect I had with my family in America. In the Philippines, my mother and father were the missionaries and I was their kid. In America, I was no longer that. They were Americans at home and I was the MK.
I was the visible foreigner.
I was the Third Culture Kid going through the textbook phases of returning to their passport country.
I was the other-race TCK who did not like small town America and the quietness and smallness of American life. I grew up in a bigger world. I spoke a different language. I had a different set of values, a different set of ways to react to situations because of growing up abroad. Up and walking away from Americans who pissed me off was a reaction from my American public middle school days. And that was no longer a socially acceptable reaction for an 18 year-old about to go to university.
It was like that moment in The Matrix where Neo violently wakes to find himself in the real world and the tentacles keeping him alive rip out of him, rejecting him. It brought me back to those nights where I would restore power to the FEBC Compound. A great light had gone out in my soul and I was standing in laundry room madly flipping the switch and nothing was happening.
When the lights finally turned back on, I was not in the same place, the people did not look or behave the same, and were not who I thought they were. All those things were gone and here was reality:
Oh my God, I have landed in small town, middle-class Christian conservative America where they actually believe all this Western culture stuff that is not in the Bible but they think it is.
I was just me again, alone in a world of Americans who did not like me, the way I spoke, what I stood for, and stared at me in Walmart like they'd never seen someone with brown skin before. It was the first time I realized that my parents and older brother were American and I was not.
I say this not to diss them but it was a really important realization that I was an other in more ways that I thought. And I think because of that, I spent the next four years of undergraduate education struggling to figure out what the hell I wanted to be in this country. I vacillated between being myself and trying to not offend anyone with my foreignness, my other-ness.
So, I changed the way I talked but not the way I dressed. Girls made fun of the fact I did not own sweatpants... but I bought a hoodie! I spent a Saturday watching VH1 “I Love The…” to understand American pop culture. I figured out who Dougie Howser was while I hid away in my room with my comic books and dreamed about the day I would have an apartment off campus so I could play with my precious Filipino knives and daggers again. I actually genuinely missed my butterfly knife to the point I would play with a ruler pretending it was my knife and I was not in philosophy class.
I ate American food and did as I was told. I went to Intervarsity Christian Fellowship even though I did not enjoy it or feel anything and bolted after every meeting. I joined clubs I wanted to like Amnesty International. On long weekends when no one was around, I would checkout the martial arts studio and throw my arnis sticks around until I was so tired I could not cry. I just wanted someone to come and play sword fighting with me. I celebrated Thanksgiving but worked every Independence Day. I stopped cooking my certain favourite Asian foods in the res halls after someone complained. I found what Asian foods did not make the entire hall cry or complain and cooked those instead.
I ate American food and did as I was told. I went to Intervarsity Christian Fellowship even though I did not enjoy it or feel anything and bolted after every meeting. I joined clubs I wanted to like Amnesty International. On long weekends when no one was around, I would checkout the martial arts studio and throw my arnis sticks around until I was so tired I could not cry. I just wanted someone to come and play sword fighting with me. I celebrated Thanksgiving but worked every Independence Day. I stopped cooking my certain favourite Asian foods in the res halls after someone complained. I found what Asian foods did not make the entire hall cry or complain and cooked those instead.
To this day, I am not entirely sure if I got it right but I am still here and have a pretty certain idea about who I am.
I think a lot of TCKs and MKs go through this. Even domestic or monoculturals go through this at some point: waking up and realising that the people you thought you knew like a heartbeat were not who you thought they were. New information resets everything.
Oh yeah, this is your home. Not mine.
The lights go out and when they turn back on, you are not where you thought you were and not with the people you thought you knew.
And you are not who you thought you were: you are a lot stronger than that.
