You know how everyone has that one defining experience or key quality in themselves that they use to break the ice or start conversations? For me, it is the fact that I lived abroad when I was a kid – hence it is only appropriate that this is the topic of my first BTSB article. My childhood consisted of being practically mute in second grade because I was thrown in a school not knowing a word of English, me and my siblings drove an ATV around our house because that’s just what kids did, and we conscientiously carried baby frogs from a swimming pool back to the pond where they came from. I’ve said the words “no, Finland doesn’t have polar bears” about a dozen hundred times and friends’ birthday parties were actually massive barbeques. We took a car to a school located 300 metres away and our burglar alarm went off almost weekly. I’m a third culture kid, nice to meet you.
A third culture kid is someone who has been raised wholly or partially in a culture which is not that of their parents. My family lived in South Africa for three years and in Canada for a year when I was in primary school. In retrospect, I guess four years doesn’t seem like that long of a time, but to this day, I feel like those years have impacted me the most. Moving from country to country, I always saw my family as a special little case among others. I didn’t overanalyse anything then (as I do today), but I acknowledged the unusualness of our situation. We were aliens in an unfamiliar world – we weren’t them, but we very much tried to be. Being Finnish abroad was sometimes just plain cool: we could speak our secret language in public places and we proudly educated our peers on Finnish traditions in school projects (“we invented saunas and Father Christmas resides in Rovaniemi”). Nevertheless, over everything hung the same sense of dislocation – the knowledge that we were different.
A brilliant description of this is as follows: “a third culture kid builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any”, as described by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken in their book Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing up Among Worlds. If this wasn’t the truest thing ever. Growing up, I never felt like I had the right to call myself South African, even less so Canadian. I was Finnish, but I didn’t even know the culture or country, not really. Summer vacations spent at our grandparents’ summer cottage in Finland didn’t give that accurate of an image of our home country. In some sense, I lived in the “bubble” of my family all the time. And as it is, I lived day to day with the knowledge that any moment my parents could sit us down and tell us we were leaving again. Yes, this kind of uncertainness may sound terribly tragic. But in all honesty, it wasn’t. I just kind of rolled with it, and it was ok.
I’m not going to get too psychological in this article, but I definitely think that living abroad as a child changes you. Personally, I would be way different, had I lived all my childhood in one place. I’ve grown a sort of tough skin and learnt to handle things very independently. After all, I was thrown in the deep end in almost everything I did, from learning a language and the ways of a country I had barely heard of before moving there. The fact that I had to constantly leave behind friends may have something to do with it too. The oldest friends I have are my siblings, the golden human beings who hung on there with me all those years. Now, I did have friends in every school I went, but as harsh as it sounds, I was subconsciously always prepared to leave them and take off again with the knowledge that chances were, I would never see them again. Yup, that does sound harsh. It probably wasn’t the healthiest habit, but I think it made things easier. Facebook friends forever though, right?
Despite everything, I loved being a nomad. By default, children experience everything more vividly and strongly, and not only that, I got to live outside of predetermined frames. I didn’t necessarily belong, but I knew I could try my limits fearlessly, whilst dissecting a culture through the eyes of a child, and developing a love towards curiosity. I love how I’ve experienced unusual things: I was once bitten by a meerkat, we’ve had monkeys steal food from our kitchen, and our school had actual houses (I was in “Pegasus”), which was just about the coolest thing ever.
I took long for me to internalize the fact that after moving to Finland, we weren’t moving again. However, since then, Helsinki has become my home and I can finally say with some confidence that I have a culture. The familiar senses of longing after change and new scenery, chronic wanderlust et cetera, they still exist. Quite recently I had to make the choice of where I wanted to study. My older sister and brother both went to universities abroad, which they probably have our third culture kid genes to thank for, and it was an intriguing option for me too. I liked the thought of a new beginning in a whole new country.
However, beyond all of this I came to understand how important it had become for me to have someplace to return. A safety net, something to come back to if all else fails. Family nearby and a human-sized city that I’ve learned to love. Starting my studies at the University of Helsinki was one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. I think that it all boils down to the fact that I have something here that I want to hold on to. I don’t know if it’s the renowned roots everyone’s talking about, the simple fact that I am Finnish or something else altogether, but for now, I just want to stay. Know this place, know who I am in it, and feel so comfortable with myself here that I can always return home.
I don’t really have any ground-breaking epiphany or insightful remark to conclude this article. I feel like I just needed to think about this out loud. After all, it is something that defines me. One thing I am sure of however, is that I am eternally grateful for my culturally ambiguous roots, a childhood that I can look back at and feel proud of. Because this little “suitcase baby” conquered the world at the age of seven, ready to take on anything.
