“What player squats an average of 300 times during a double-header?” Six questioning eyes look over at Anne as the question is read to her. Oh why did she have to land on the sports category? And what exactly was a “double-header”? What sport did it even refer to? As she mulls over in her head these questions and wonders how she can possibly ask what a “double-header” even is without the look of astonishment at her supposed ignorance by her fellow players, Anne asks herself why she agreed to playing a game of Trivial Pursuit. She was always humiliated whenever she played. It was not her fault that she was not able to follow American sports while her parents were stationed in Eastern Africa. Moreover….who cared? This was just one more piece of overwhelming evidence that she would never fit in.
Anne is not alone in her fears of fitting in and being labeled different. These fears are shared by a whole population of people called Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCK’s).
Third-culture kids (a term coined by Dr. Ruth Hill Useem) are by definition those who have spent some of their growing up years in a foreign country and experience a sense of not belonging to their passport country when they return to it. In adapting to life in a ‘foreign’ country they have also missed learning ways of their homeland and feel most at home in the ‘third-culture’ which they have created almost by default. ATCK’s are simply TCK’s all grown up.ATCK’s are a renowned group of people from as far back in time as Abraham's children, and ranging in genre from Military Brats and Diplomat’s children to Missionary Kids and Corporate children with every thing in between.
Some common characteristics of ATCK’s as listed in the research done by Ruth Van Reken and the late David Pollock include: a Large world view; easy language acquisition; cultural bridges within their communities; rootlessness—“Home” is everywhere and nowhere; restlessness; sense of belonging is often in relationship to others of similar background rather than shared race or ethnicity alone.
Through these characteristics we find a genre of people who live in fear of Trivial Pursuit and other such activities that hold such strong cultural ties. For them the geography and history sections of the game might come easily, while pop culture and sports trivia confuses and frustrates them, as it puts them once again on the outside of a culture looking in.
However, there is hope for these ATCK’s as their population is growing with the increasing globalization of the world. In 1984, Dr. Ted Ward, of Michigan State University, stated that “TCK’s were the “prototype citizens” of the future. How little did he know at that time that he would be so correct. Some 20 plus years later everywhere you look you find a product of a third culture childhood. In fact so much so that a new term has been coined CCK or Cross Cultural Kid’s who are by definition “a person who has lived in—or meaningfully interacted with—two or more cultural environments for a significant period of time during developmental years.”
"The stress for most CCKs is not from the multiplicity of cultures they experience in their childhood but comes when they try to repatriate or fit into some other cultural box others expect them to belong to but which is being defined in racial, nationalistic, or other more traditional ways of defining “culture”.Perhaps one of the greatest gifts to give a CCK is to acknowledge the reality that this world of multiple cultures they have experienced as children is a valid place of belonging, even if not rooted in one geographical place or ethnicity. Need to stop “pathologizing” the issues but begin to perhaps define new norms." - David Pollock
