A global nomad’s perspective.
When I saw my friend Si’s e-mail telling me that another earthquake had hit, only one thought came to mind. My close friend Liv would have been at work, right in the heart of Christchurch’s Central Business District. WHERE. WAS. SHE.
I still remain unsure of how to approach the situation. Even though I identify myself partly as Egyptian, my pale complexion and my passport say that it is not my place to discuss the future of Egypt.
Is Rahm Emanuel a resident of Chicago? Well, he was born in Chicago, grew up in Chicago, was educated in Chicago and represented Chicago in Congress for three terms. Yet he’s not ‘Chicago’ enough to run for Mayor? The Illinois courts seem to think so. Because Emanuel did not physically reside in Chicago for the last 12 months, they disqualified him from this year’s mayoral race. This absurd story runs parallel to many Third Culture Kid tales we hear on Denizen. My story is not unique: raised with American friends, educated in American schools, attended American university, yet cannot live or work in America without struggle because I was born on foreign soil. Trying to put hard and fast rules to the terms “residency” or “citizenship” hurts everyone. Chicagoans lose the chance to vote for the frontrunner — Emanuel had 44 percent support according to polls, and $12 million in the bank. The American workforce loses talented, international, college-educated Third Culture Kids who are not given a fair chance at success. These TCKs who look, …
Denizen365 is a daily self-portrait photo blog brought to you by Denizen, a magazine for Third Culture Kids. At Denizen365, we ask Third Culture Kids to visually express, through self-portraits, “Where are you from?” As you will see, no two global nomads are the same, and you can’t judge a book by its cover. We hope to visually explore the profiles of 365 TCKs, while connecting this community of travelers across the world. Check out the site, or submit your photo here. Don’t forget to join our community on Facebook and Twitter.
I started Denizen in 2008 because no one was documenting the modern Third Culture Kid experience, even though the number of global nomads was steadily rising. I believe this is changing. This bimonthly column will round up news and links about Third Culture Kids. If you see relevant articles or blog posts in your travels across the web, please drop me a note at steph@denizenmag.com. 1. Julian Assange: Global nomad sheds born identity With no permanent address and having moved 37 times by the time he was 14, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the ultimate global nomad: both everywhere, online and connected, and nowhere, all at once. Author Brigid Delaney discusses how the old rules of nation states are struggling to deal with a nomads of a borderless, digital world. [Sydney Morning Herald] 2. NYTimes blog post features expat kid “We were well-designed for espionage,” Mary H.K. Choi says about expat kids living in Hong Kong. In her post on The New York Times’ Opinionator blog, Choi illustrates the parallels between the expat social circles of Hong Kong and …
When Heidi Sand-Hart was 21, she got her hands on the TCK Bible: “Third Culture Kids – The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds.” After devouring it, she became even hungrier for personal literature out there for TCKs. She soon realized that there wasn’t much at all, so she decided to write her own, which is called “Home Keeps Moving.” “Home Keeps Moving” is a collection of memories that Sand-Hart gathers from her cross-cultural life, moving from Derby to Norway to Sussex to London to India. As I read the book, being pulled into someone else’s description of feeling between worlds, I enjoyed tagging along on someone else’s global journey. Compared to Pollock and Van Reken’s book, “Home Keeps Moving” is a much more personal, lengthy description of the actual experience of having a home that is anywhere and everywhere. With most personal memoirs though, inevitably you can feel like a tag-along to the story itself. On rare occasions, you are brought into the narrator’s seat. While I enjoyed the book, what I really loved …
‘Nomad’s’ Guide’ is written for TCKs facing a double transition – adjusting to a new stage of life as an independent young adult, as well as adjusting to a new culture.
As expats, we feel the need to support our own countries, countries that we have identified with in the past, or well, teams that we just plain like. As a TCK, I find it hard to support just one team
When I started Denizen, I never expected the amount of emails I would receive from readers who had been touched by the site. A lot of people email just to share their stories, which is interesting and fantastic. Tonight I exported a bunch of those emails into Wordle (see a sample of those emails here). Here’s the result… All I can say is thank you, so very much, for reading Denizen and for sharing your kind emails.
When Kendra Mirasol and Charisse Kosova of IOR Global Services noticed more minority women going abroad, they wondered if minority status made expat assignment easier. Since good expat research is hard to come by, they decided to conduct their own investigation. The focus: female minority women going abroad for business. A study can’t get much more specific than that, which meant preliminary research included only 25 respondents, 13 of whom went through extensive interviews. When they presented their findings at the Families in Global Transition conference in March, the numerical data was unsurprising: “Is the overseas assignment a developmental part of your career plan?” 83 percent said yes. “Did any of the company’s preparation focus on female minority issues?” 89 percent said no. Instead, the most interesting results from their research came from the anecdotes collected through extended interviews. Here are some quotes from female minority expats that Kendra and Charisse presented: “People assumed I was Filipino and had married my husband because I was his maid. It fit their sense of order.” “Initially [the …
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