You could say I’m a third culture kid, but who knows at what
points my different cultures articulate. Without the borders of a mono-cultural
upbringing narrowing my mind, I find myself standing at the frontiers of global
processes in every opinion that marches out of my brain. I am the member of a
strange and beautiful community, a diverse diaspora of people who call the
whole world their home, and easily feel alone. Yet we are a species who are
comfortable with our loneliness; we even yearn for it. We are the people who
reject the familiar and chase the most foreign because our inborn culture shock
requires continuous clashes of cultures to bring out the best in us.
Not only do we find the familiar in unknown places, but in
unknown individuals too. We find comfort and understanding in the person who
has never touched the earth we’ve grown up on, or tasted our native tongue on
their lips, but who suffered from the same internal dichotomy that emblazoned
this modern malaise into our own multicultural hearts. Our differences are in
essence our shared features: we were born with a world without windows or
doors, raw products of globalization ready to take over the world, open to
whatever idea or identity that fate will throw our way.
For us, home is not a base to which we return, but an
emotion that we continually evoke and revoke as we travel through moments that
challenge the limits that hold most people in a room where they wait for an
identity to be handed to them in a small book. We scour outer landscapes to
find the commonalities between the constantly diverging and merging traditions
of our world – a world in which the foreign is familiar and the foreigner is
our closest friend.
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