Layers of Identity

By Jenni Gate

“Middle child syndrome just doesn’t exist!” How many times I heard this as I was growing up. But I was convinced that birth order meant everything to personality. I was the verbal one, the mouthpiece for my older and younger sisters. I was the one who stood up to our parents when I thought life was unfair, stood up with an attitude. I was the outgoing sister who went out and introduced myself to the neighborhood every time we moved, then brought back playmates for my shy sisters. I was self-reliant, stubborn, moody, and introspective. My parents said I was “complicated.”

My epiphany came on the day of my grandmother’s funeral. We went back to her house and walked through it together. The emotion built in all of us. Mom put her arm around Trina’s shoulder and pulled her close. Dad reached over to Susie and hugged her tightly. I stood in the middle of the room, tears stinging my eyes, feeling profoundly alone. As I stormed out of the house, my dad tried to reach out to me. I brushed him away, thinking, “This is it, the one, single moment that sums up my life.”

It took me a while, but I finally realized being in the middle means being self-reliant, independent, and self-satisfying. My parents and my sisters love me, but being in the middle means being alone and on the outside more often than it means being surrounded. It means mediating with others to keep the peace. It means looking up to the sister ahead of me while pulling along the one behind. It means standing on the sidelines and looking in at the way others interact.

As a child being uprooted every few years and moved to another country, being self-reliant, independent, and resilient became a survival skill. Resilience is a Third Culture Kid (TCK) trait. Adaptability, the ability to blend in even when we don’t fit in, is another. And it could be said that the sense of being on the outside looking in defines much of the TCK experience.

What is a TCK? A TCK is someone who spends a significant period of time (more than a two-week vacation) outside of their parents’ home culture. Not fully fitting into the host culture, the family seeks out others who are also not from their home cultures. These friendships form the third culture. As we adapt to different cultures, we absorb much of our host culture; out of necessity, we grow close bonds within the culture of our immediate family; and we identify most closely with others of our third culture. We build relationships within all the cultures we interact with, but never have full ownership or belonging in any.

After finishing high school in Pakistan, I returned to the US for college. That year, I suffered the most intense culture shock of my life. I had an identity crisis.

Returning to my passport country, the U.S.A., meant coming “home” to a place I barely knew or understood. My senior year of high school, I got caught in the first Russian-backed coup in Afghanistan. It was bloody and violent, and I was well on the way to squishing the experience down into a little box and crushing it deep, deep inside. Coming home to the U.S. that summer, fireworks on the 4^th of July freaked me out. Search light-type displays lighting up a night sky to advertise a new car dealership struck an irrational fear deep in the pit of my stomach.

I began my first year of college with mixed feelings, but mostly excitement to begin my life as an adult. I wanted to learn everything, try everything, experience everything my home culture had to offer. My new home was in the dorms of a Pacific Northwest campus set in a lush, beautifully manicured lawns and gardens in the middle of a rain forest. The contrast could not have been more exquisite. When I left Pakistan, the dust was rising off the desert plains and the monsoons would not start for several months yet. The Himalayas, always covered with snow, rose starkly from the dry plains below.

In Pakistan, the average annual income per family at the time was $100. At my college, although a percentage of the students were on financial aid, many came from wealthy families. Some of those flaunted sports cars, designer dresses, flashy jewelry.

A bigger difference was in traffic. In Pakistan, all of humanity and half of the animal kingdom share the roads: overloaded buses with people hanging onto the sides and goats and chickens on top, crowded taxis, motorcycles, bicycles, water buffalo and horses pulling carts, men pushing wagons, and people walking. At college, my friends would load three or four of us in a car and zip down a highway. I felt an overwhelming sense of separateness from people in other vehicles, a sensation that we were cocooned from others in our own separate environment as we weaved in and out of traffic. It was intense cognitive dissonance.

Carpet vendors, Islamabad
Photo by E.L. Headrick

But the biggest shock was at the grocery store. In Pakistan, we shopped a lot at the local outdoor and covered markets. We bought from vendors with small stalls crowded with beautiful displays of fruit, nuts, and vegetables. We bargained for every purchase, enjoying the interactions with shopkeepers and sense of pride when we knew we struck the right price. Special finds on the black market were prized. We understood the value of items that made their way across the desert on the back of a camel or smuggled across borders. I valued hand-made items, knowing the life of toil, uncertainty, and strife that went into their creation. Indian ragas blared from tiny transistor radios in each stall. Shopkeepers called to us by name and invited us to join them for tea, and we sat and sipped and admired the produce, making our decisions at leisure. About once a month, we shopped at the PX (post exchange) for items like toothpaste, toilet paper, shampoo, and alcohol. It was a small shop and only carried one or two brands of anything.

The first time I shopped with friends at college, I was paralyzed by over-stimulation. My friends lost patience with me as I stared at aisle after aisle of hundreds of choices, wondering how anyone ever made up their minds which one to pick. Endless choices of toilet paper—could there really be any difference? The aisles stacked high with factory manufactured goods were intimidating and impersonal. At the checkout stand, our items were rung up on a cash register. There was no bargaining, no casual talk while we verbally danced around the price of an item; just a "how are you today?" to which the cashier did not want an answer, a total amount due, and a "have a nice day" as we walked toward the door. I felt no satisfaction at the exchange.

It was not until I started college that I began to realize how unique my upbringing was. Rather than fitting in with my “home” culture, I was once again an outsider looking in. I’ve lived in the U.S. now, off and on, for my adulthood, and I’ve continued my nomadic, self-reliant ways. I know change, I know loss, and I know the excitement of new places. Overriding all of that, I know I am forever the outsider looking in.

***

TCKs learn to say goodbyes early and often. Some of us come to hate them, knowing we may never see our closest friend of the last few years or months again. Often, it is easier to argue than to accept the next loss. Infrequently, someone I have said goodbye to reappeared later in my life. To deal with the difficulty of goodbyes, I keep in mind how changeable life is. I prefer to wish us happy travels, until we meet again.

If you would like to read more about my travels or life as a global nomad, please visit my blog, Nomad Trails and Tales.

My First Time In A War Zone

By Jenni Gate

Car in Sandbox
Photo by Tim Lang (CC by 2.0)

At the age of six, I was magical. I had the power to create and shape anything I wanted in my sandbox. I spent hours creating and destroying, shaping mud into magical foods and fantastic animals. In my sandbox, I was like Aladdin flying on a carpet around the world. With magic thoughts, I visited my grandparents in America. Magic sang from me in my sandbox. I traveled down a river on a raft, through a jungle with snakes hanging from the trees. With a blink of the eyes, I was on a camel in the Sahara.

In 1966, our house in Kaduna, the capital of the Northern Region of Nigeria, was in the suburbs of the city in the agricultural heartland. There was a large field surrounding our house. Nearby, cattle grazed on dry, grassy plains, hot and dusty, with snakes slithering through long grass.

We loved Nigeria. We had an active social life, clubs and parties, friends of every nationality, road trips into the country, lazy days spent by the river or at a hotel swimming pool. We loved our nanny, Martha, who watched my little sister and me when my mother was out during the day. Ussman, a highly-respected hajj in our community, managed our household. 

At night, before we crawled under our mosquito netting, we watched termites swarm around the light posts on our street. As some touched the heat of the bulbs, the lights sizzled, their bodies popped, and they fell to the ground. Sometimes the hot, charred scent wafted past our noses in the night. The Nigerians gathered and ate the fat termite bodies. Ussman said they were a gift from Allah, to feed the people. It was magic.

When I played in my sandbox, I created swarms of termites to feed my pretend people. My older sister Susie dug streets and built houses on her side of the sandbox. She honked the horns of her match box cars, revved engines and sped the cars through her town. She was not happy when my imaginary termites tried to feed her imaginary people by dropping in big clumps all around her cars.

Sometimes when we played, we saw dik-dik, small bush deer, watching us from the field next to our house. Magic shimmered in the air, as if the deer could talk to us.

Every afternoon, Ussman came out on the porch at dusk and called us in. "Pickin," (children) he called, "time to come in now." He worried about the cobras, adders and scorpions living under our house and porch and in holes in the ground. Once we were safely inside, large, black cobras, as high as my shoulders and as dark as the night swayed before the windows, spying on us from the pitch black night.

My parents loved to entertain. The Irish Catholic priest, Father Bell, was a frequent guest. At Christmas, he always blessed our house, expecting a nog in return. If Dad shared his good whiskey, Father Bell blessed the house no matter what the season was. He was jolly and loved to drink and dance. We once had him in a conga line, and a woman dancing in line behind him flopped his cassock up and down with the beat of the music.

"Father Bell, do your blessings really work?" I asked.

"Aye, child," he said, "they keep you safe and happy." He was the most magical person I knew.

Playing in my sandbox one spring day in 1966 while Susie was at school, I heard explosions. I hurried inside as a crowd of angry people ran down the street, sticks and machetes in hand. Ussman reassured us that he would not let anything happen to us.

That night, we heard on BBC radio that the Premier of Nigeria was assassinated, and his home a few blocks from our house was destroyed. Military leaders of Ibo ethnicity seized power. 

There were frequent riots, and school was often disrupted. I sat in my room, scooting Susie's matchbox cars along the windowsill, wishing my sandbox could be inside.

At school, air raid practices became the norm for Susie, who never believed her desk would really save her. Whenever she dove under her desk, she invariably found herself with her nose butting up to the smelly boy in front of her. She began to think she would take her chances if there ever was an air raid.

Masks & Spears

One night we were robbed as we slept, and the blankets were stolen from our beds. In a patch of brush across from our house, Dad and several neighbors and servants armed with poison-tipped spears and bows and arrows converged on a hiding place and found curtains, weapons, our silverware set, even a typewriter. The thieves had a spear and some ground nuts in a little wooden bowl with primitive animal patterns burnished into the surface.

Thieves' Bowl

It turned out our night watchman had failed to pay his "dues" or protection money to the corrupt police chief who was running a protection racket. Dad fired the watchman and hired one Tuareg, a fierce nomadic warrior, to guard our house. Although we hired only one, at night we saw hundreds of small cooking fires in the bush surrounding our house. When we put our lights out, they hid and waited for thieves. I felt safer with the Tuaregs guarding our house, their fires flickering magically into the distant brush. But I still made Dad check under my bed every night.

Playing in my sandbox, I used sticks as spears and knives. My make-believe people locked their doors at night. Sometimes they fought battles and had to have a priest bless their homes.

In July, 1966, there was a second military coup, putting Colonel Yakubu Gowon in power. There were several riots. Kaduna, as the capitol of the Northern Region, became embroiled in turmoil. The Muslim Hausa from the north swept south, slaughtering Christian Ibos from the east. The Ibos retaliated. Portrayed as a religious war in the international press, it was probably rooted more in nepotism than religion. Thousands of refugees fled across Nigeria. Bodies lay in the streets near our home. 

Throughout 1966, we heard sporadic gunfire and fighting. Mom worried about Dad being stranded from us at his USAID job in the city, and he often was. Ussman began warning us to stay away from certain areas of the city because there was going to be a spontaneous riot. His predictions were always right. 

Magic thoughts dimmed as I started school. Our Embassy advised that if there was an air raid, we should dive into the ditches along the road, essentially open sewers. Mom said she would rather take her chances with the planes. Life went on.

We lived with riots and gunfire in the night. Our dreams were full of army men coming into the house while we slept. Susie sometimes whispered, "If anything happens to our parents, Ussman can walk us north to Niger. We will find people to help us there."

"What's going to happen to them?" I asked.

"I don't know," Susie answered, "but we need to figure out how to get back to the States."

I no longer fantasized about magic. Streams of refugees passed through our city. My childish prayers and magic would not help anyone. I stopped pretending.

In 1967, after months of violence, the evacuation orders came. We said a quick goodbye to Ussman with no time to say goodbye to the other people we loved. The plane loomed large before us. Dead and injured bodies littered the tarmac. My magic was also dead.

In our absence, the Embassy sent packers to pack and ship all our belongings to us. When our things arrived in America months later, everything of value had been stolen, but the packers had carefully wrapped all the garbage in our wastebaskets and shipped it to us. Unpacking the box from my room, I smiled when I noticed a sandy matchbox car cocooned in the trash.