No one asked where I was from anymore. It made me feel odd, a sort of emptiness. After all this time it was very strange to feel a grief over regaining my Australian accent! That grief was real, however. I had dismantled my sense of identity rooted in an Australian accent, only to replace it with a sense of identity rooted in an international accent. Wherever I was, I wanted my accent to say something about who I was. This is a dilemma faced by many Third Culture Kids, expats, and other cross-cultured individuals. Our inside and outside don’t map exactly.

I hated the fact that I was losing my accent. It was terrifying – no exaggeration. I felt, on some level, that my core identity was slipping through my fingers and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. A lot of the emotion came from my experience as a teenage expat (TCK). There is an emotional toll that comes with having an accent that doesn’t totally match your passport. But realising it was now a choice, and that what I gained was worth the cost, made all the difference in the world.

I’ve had many experiences of being Obviously Foreign in places where I was foreign, and in places I called home. I’ve had many experiences of being assumed local in places that were, or felt, foreign to me. Today I want to share a very small story from my time in China of someone seeing past my Obviously Foreign exterior.

Families are often largely unaware of the additional cultural influences they are inviting into their families by choosing an international education for their children. The assumption is that they are “normal” Chinese kids, who should have the same attitudes, values, and language skills as peers attending normal Chinese schools. But their instruction on how to think, and behave in society, follows different cultural norms.

Ask what might be confusing or frustrating your child – is there language or cultural understanding they are missing, and need help with? Are your own expectations as a parent not clear? Might these be confusing for a child living with different expectations during the school day? Ask what extra information, support, love, attention, or skills you might be able to provide to your child, to help them relax and grow as they walk through two cultures and languages at once. Also, keep in mind the impact of grief on TCKs, and whether this might be part of the equation.

Our relationships with people are complicated: multi-layered and complex. So are our relationships with places. The reality is that we DO have relationships with places - emotional and legal relationships. When we allow ourselves to apply the vocabulary of love and human relationships to describe our relationships with place, we gain the ability to describe complex emotions and articulate multi-layered connections. This opens the door to increased clarity and comfort.

Many people around the world have fallen in love with countries that will never legally embrace them. Many TCKs live with this. The place of their childhood becomes inaccessible. They have no legal right to belong. There is no recognition of their connection. The place they love, and were raised in, does not acknowledge them. It’s hard to keep giving yourself to a place that won’t ever love you back, to invest in a place that won’t invest in you.

The title Misunderstood is not supposed to be static – that TCKs exist in a state of being misunderstood that will never change. Yes – it’s true. Many people in a TCK’s life won’t instinctively understand their experiences, and some won’t want to try. It’s tiring, if not impossible, to be the one who advocates for yourself constantly. But it doesn't have to be that way! There is hope in remembering that no one completely understands anyone else. We all have to share our stories, and try to listen to what another is saying about their experiences. What we all have in common are our emotions. We have all experienced loss, fun, joy, grief. It might look different, but the emotions underneath help us empathise. Learning to connect with and express the way we feel about things we’ve been through helps others go there with us.

When we think about funerals, how can we be sensitive to the needs of the globally mobile, and anyone who has difficulty attending, especially now during pandemic conditions? I have five practical suggestions for planning funerals that help support those who are grieving, whether in person or from a distance - or embracing both.

My uncle passed away last month, and I was able to go to his funeral. It was my first family funeral in 15 years. In the 15 years I spent living outside Australia, only three of my relatives passed away. But being far from family when death occurs is a common struggle among the globally mobile.

Saying goodbye sucks. Losing friends sucks. The reality of that change and loss can’t be ‘fixed.’ But staying in that place of pain, and the helplessness and hopelessness that often goes with it, doesn’t change the past. We must acknowledge the truth of our lives. But we don’t have to be ruled by it forever. We get to choose what happens next. I’ve found that a few simple tools can help us reframe our thoughts and take control of the future.

The ability to stay in touch after a move doesn’t take away the sadness of losing that person from daily life. And there’s no guarantee, even with the internet, that two people will actually stay in touch. So while reminding someone they can stay in touch through the internet is well meant, these comments usually aren’t comforting. It often makes TCKs feel that they aren’t supposed to grieve, or that they shouldn’t show their sadness. When a child says goodbye to a friend, they don’t yet know what that friendship will look like on the other side of the move — whether it will continue or not, whether they will ever see their friend in person again or not. Sometimes there will be reunions, but not always. It is so important for TCKs to be able to grieve friendships that change or are lost. Their feelings of sadness are real and valid and need to be expressed – and are worth listening to.

The first draft of the Aussie TCKs manuscript is complete! Now we are looking for more survey responses to provide better statistics, and selecting quotes from Australian TCKs to go in the book. As you can see, about 3/4 of the people who have responded so far are Millennials or Gen Z adult TCKs. We are definitely seeking responses from older Australian TCKs as well! The responses to years lived outside Australia in childhood are quite evenly spread, and can be divided into five groups of similar size.

If you haven’t experienced this litany of losses yourself, I hope you can begin to imagine how this bruises a young heart. Losing people we care about is painful. Often it’s harder to be the one left behind. Quite rationally, many TCKs develop methods to try to avoid the sadness and emotional pain of goodbyes that they see as inevitable.

I’ve been missing Beijing lately. It’s hard to explain exactly what it is I miss. I was just living an ordinary life. Buying groceries, cooking meals, working from home, meeting a friend at a cafe, or for dinner. But all the little things of life are subtly different in each place. The sights and smells and sounds are different.