❝You are nothing more than the story you live❞
The first time I was asked this, I was five. I stared back at my classmate, though it was an easy question really, but it felt kind of weird knowing there isn't anyone else in the room that will match my answer. I got asked that question a lot that day; my answer was always followed by them talking about some piece of Indian media they'd consumed which I'd never heard of, or sometimes a head movement, and accent switch that felt oddly offensive but I couldn't really tell why. The few other desi kids I knew all went to the same school, were only friends with other desi people, and only spoke Hindi, a language I "knew" but was never fully fluent in. I found it quite weird how they managed to live in this all-desi bubble in a completely different country; I would be impressed if that hadn't made them surprisingly racist.
I hadn't been asked that in school for a while, but here I was, on my way out of my Year 6 classroom. She was a new teacher, and I later came to find out she was grossly educated on India, though she didn't stop any of the other kids from making their side comments about a "funny smell" when I opened my lunchbox. Her intense knowledge about India just made it even more embarrassing not to be able to answer basic questions about the country I'm supposedly from. She ended that interaction by saying "Are you really from India?" A joke. We both walked out laughing. That summer, we went to India, and I heard that joke over and over again, to the point it didn't even feel like one.
This was no longer an easy question; I didn't really know how to answer it without delving into an explanation. That's not the only thing I didn't know. I didn't know how to be comfortable in my own skin, with my hair, my features, "rules" I had to follow because of my culture. Everyone around me was so different from me, physically. But in every other sense, I related to people here more than I did back in India. The music I was introduced to, the references I laughed at, the food I enjoyed, social cues, and everything in between, all made me feel so very different when I visited my cousins. At times it made me feel like a poser, an imposter of sorts, both in India, and back at home.
It was weird coming from my own brother. "No, like seriously how do you answer that? I get asked that so much here in uni." Sometimes I lose sight of the fact I'm not the only one that goes through this; it's not just me. Especially with him, getting the same side comments from aunties made this a fairly common discussion between us. Except now, we had both made peace with it; we had accepted it.
My supervisor asked me last week. A question I still don't look forward to. Though I've learnt how to answer it to myself, and that's all that really matters. My identity with both places was so intertwined it became one; it became me. A third culture kid is a person who spent a significant chunk of their childhood in a place with a completely different culture. Raised surrounded by two different cultures, they form one of their own, a "third culture" which is a mix of both. And I'd pick that third culture of mine over anything anyway.
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