"Where are you from?"

“Where are you from?”It’s a simple question, one that everyone asks you when they first get to know you. It makes sense; if you’re getting to know someone, you’re curious about where they grew up, you’re curious about their high school experience, you’re curious about what sorts of things they were exposed to. It’s by no means a malicious question. And yet, every time someone asks me, I hesitate before spitting out an answer that isn’t incorrect. Do I give them the whole spiel? Do I refer to home as where my friends are? Do I tell them where my family now lives?During the first ten years of my life, I’ve moved four times and lived in four different countries. I am not at all ungrateful for the experience, as I have been able to experience so many cultures and directly learn about the differences between cultures. But it’s...confusing. I grew up with Korean parents while I learned more and more about Western culture (I went to schools that were based on either American or English curricula). They’d grown up with values native to their nation. I grew up with Western values indirectly and directly embedded into me through school and the growing Internet. Much of my thought processing methods were instilled in me via social media.By definition, a third culture kid (TCK) is someone who is raised in a different culture than that of their parents or that of their birth. They’re exposed to a huge amount of influences when they’re growing up, which, of course, affects the way they are when they are adults. They may be bilingual, trilingual, or more. Wikipedia actually covers a lot of this really well—the article mentions various psychological effects that growing up like this can have, and the way it may affect some relationships that they have with others, not necessarily in a negative or positive way.The concept of home is somewhat foreign to me, as it sometimes can be for many third culture kids. Truthfully, I don’t remember my birth country very much. Sometimes, it felt like I was living in a half-assed nest before the wind carried me away to some other tree. When I was a toddler, home was just a house in which my parents lived and I slept. But I soon realized that the concept of home involving a house was flawed; home is an abstract concept, something that can’t be explained with a simple set of numbers and letters.Over winter break, I visited my high school, which was all the way across the country from where my family now lives. All my old teachers asked me “How long are you home for?” and I again, struggled to answer this innocuous question. Do I tell them the whole spiel? Do I tell refer to home as where my friends are? Do I tell them where my family now lives? Really, it doesn’t matter. What’s interesting about Brown is that it’s full of other third culture kids who get to find each other but also full of kids who had a “normal” settled life. It can be weird as a third culture kid, looking into this life and thinking about how different your own life would be if you’d had that stability. But different isn’t always bad. “Being a TCK has allowed me to embrace the question of identity in a very warm way,” says Alison Sneader, who identifies as a TCK. Since she herself grew up in cultures very different from that of her native one, she feels that “aspects of these cultures have been incorporated into her own.” It’s one of the things I’ve found is both a crisis and a strength with being a third culture kid. You figure out quickly that your environment doesn’t define you. You forge your own self. With everything changing around you, you learn to be your own rock. With Brown being a well-known institution around the world, a strong international student community is able to be formed, which can provide a good support system. “Being a TCK has not been a big deal for me at Brown,” Nicholas Fuchs states, “As an international student, [the international community] is helpful for finding others to relate to.” As with many higher education institutions, the students attending Brown come from all sorts of backgrounds, which is usually not the case with standard public high schools, whether in America or elsewhere. Most students attending those schools tend to have lived in the town for a significant part of their life, which leads to a more homogenous culture. But “here at Brown,” adds Fuchs, “I am finding that it’s easier to find other TCKs.”It’s truly a wonder that we attend an institution with a student body diverse culturally and racially. It’s not to say that it’s perfect in representation, but what Brown has has allowed many of us to find a home in a place away from home. And integrating all these backgrounds together allows us to grow as human beings who are all trying their best to find their place in the world. “When meeting other students on campus, I'm excited to learn about the cultures that they, too, have brought to Brown,” says Sneader, “I understand that identity, be it cultural or otherwise, can be a complex discussion, and I truly look forward to these discussions.” Image via.