What It Means to Wear a Green Shirt

Imagine for a moment that you’re in a large room full of people.  Upon entering, every person in the room, including you, was given a shirt of a specific color.  At some point a loud voice calls across the room and asks for everyone to please divide up into groups according to the color of their shirts.  The people in the room quickly divide themselves into two groups.  On one side of the room are people in yellow shirts, and on the other side are people in blue shirts.  As you look down to see which group you should be in, you suddenly make a shocking discovery: your shirt isn’t yellow or blue.  It’s green.  What are you supposed to do now? 

This is the world TCKs find themselves in.  Third Culture Kids, as the acronym stands for, are kids who have been raised in more than one culture.  Typically this means that their parents are citizens of one country, but, for whatever reason, the child has spent part or maybe all of their life in another country.  Most children, if left in this second culture long enough, will begin to blend in with it and may even come to think of it as their home culture.  Occasional visits and stories from parents may be the only thing linking them to their original “homeland”.  In most cases it is fairly obvious that the child is not, in fact, from this second culture, but somehow they blend in regardless. 

And then comes the dreaded day when the child is forced to return to their home culture.  Typically this comes when they graduate high school and are sent back “home” to go to college and find a job and begin building their own life.  Everyone just assumes that because this child has a passport from that country and was born to parents of that nationality that they should automatically fit in.  There’s just one (big) problem: this strange land is no longer home.  It’s like being born in a blue place to blue parents, but then spending a vast chunk of your life living among yellow people.  What results is a person who is really neither blue nor yellow.  No, we are something entirely different, something somewhere between the two.  We are the kids in the green shirts. 

I myself am a missionary kid, and I spent six years of my pre-college life living in Europe: almost four years in Croatia and just over two years in Poland.  Before, after, and in-between there was life in the United States.  That makes me a bit of an oddity among TCKs.  I was only out of the U.S. for two consecutive years before I graduated high school and returned to my native country.  Most people would assume, then, that culture shock on the return trip would have been minimal.  They couldn’t be more wrong. 

I have been back in the U.S. for just over a year, and there are still days when I feel like a foreigner.  I don’t know all the new songs or why it is that everybody just has to get the new I-Phone.  I have yet to see a single episode of “Friends” or “Smallville”, which means that any references to the characters go right over my head.  When my friends talk about actors or sports teams, it isn’t unusual for me to have to ask who they’re talking about.  In fact, it happens so much that we’ve made a sort of joke out of it.  Whenever one of them gives me that look that asks if I’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, I remind them with a smile that I was raised in a foreign country.  It’s not entirely true, but at least it earns a few chuckles and turns the focus away from my apparent lack of any relevant cultural knowledge. 

Despite having a passport that clearly says United States of America on the cover, most days I feel far more European.  I followed the 2012 Euro Cup religiously, and spent a good deal of time talking with my family about who would win each match.  When the Super Bowl rolls around I’m lucky if I know the name of even one of the two teams before the scoreboard gives it away.  After two years in Poland I only speak a bare fraction of the language, and yet I find myself yearning for the Polish worship songs that seemed to so perfectly capture my heart despite the fact that I could barely understand them.  I also have a tendency to make unconscious comments about “the Americans.”  At which point my friends have to laughingly remind me that, despite all of my valiant denial, I am in fact one of them. 

And yet, at the same time, I’m not.  Not really.  There may have been a time when I was American, but those days are long gone.  There’s too much yellow mixed in with the blue.  No matter what anyone says, the truth is that I’m green now.  TCKs come in all shades of green.  Some of them are die-hard blues with just a few years of yellow added into the middle.  Some of them are almost completely yellow with the only blue being the letters on their passport and the relatives they visit every three years.  But regardless of how much of each color is mixed in, none of us is really one or the other.  We’re all something in the middle. 

It’s always interesting to watch TCKs interact.  You could take two TCKs who grew up in completely opposite environments, and if you put them in a room together it’s almost certain that they will not only find each other, but that they will bond with each other on a deeper level than either of them does with anyone else in the room.  Even someone with whom they have the exact same interests.  Why?   Because we as TCKs understand something about each other that no one else can.  We understand that strange betweenness, the strong need to belong somewhere when it seems we belong nowhere.  No matter what the exact shade, we realize that we are all green.  And since we don’t seem to fit in with any of the other color groups, we might as well form one of our own. 

My name is Ash, and no matter what my passport says I’m not an American.  Neither am I a European.  I’m a TCK, a proud wearer of the metaphorical green shirt.  And this is what life looks like through my eyes. 

-Ash