Third-Culture Kid

By Jennifer Koshy

Jennifer as a child with her brother and mom, the only passengers on a night bus that her father drove and operated in Dammam, Saudi Arabia (2002).

“A third-culture kid! That’s what you are!” exclaimed my freshman year roommate, ecstatic to learn that I,

my brown skin contrasting with her pale white skin, her cheery disposition contrasting with my reserved nature, my T-shirts contrasting with her tank tops, 

finally had something in common with her.

Of course, I longed to agree with her. I could finally have a phrase to revert to when asked: 

“Where are you from?”

“Where were you born?” 

“Where are your parents from?”

I had heard the pride in her voice when she first described herself in that way to me. As if to relate my lifetime as a brown woman on this Earth to her stint in an “exotic” locale filled with people who looked like me yet nonetheless surrounded by expatriates and children of diplomats. I wondered who I would have become if I had ever felt a sense of belonging for my “third culture.” Perhaps I would have been more like my roommate, who was at the moment staying on her side of the room anticipating my approval of her choice of phrasing, 

her born-again Christian fervor contrasting with my Catholicism, my cynical and distrusting parents who had only ever seen the worst of what the world had to offer contrasting with her adventurous parents who encouraged her to travel the world, go on dates, find love.

“Third culture kid,” I uttered the slogan aloud, letting the words roll off my tongue before attempting to make sense of the aftertaste.

How do I tell her that unlike her father, who received an all-expenses-paid trip from his company to relocate his family to Dubai while he worked there with the authority of an American citizen,

my father left India for Saudi Arabia in his early 20s with nothing save for the hope that he would earn enough to support his widowed mother and his seven younger siblings? 

How do I tell her that unlike her mother, who could afford to be a stay-at-home mom in a foreign country because of her husband’s ample salary, 

my mother came to Saudi Arabia unmarried and fresh out of nursing school at 23 years old with the expectation of earning enough to help her father, who had just suffered his first stroke, and was forced to negotiate for her hard-earned wages in an unfamiliar language before eventually succumbing to the realization that she would just have to accept that as an Indian national, she would be paid much less than her Saudi Arabian co-workers regardless of her supervisory status as a charge nurse?

How do I even begin to explain to her

that Saudi Arabia, the country whose culture I am supposed to claim as my own, refuses to accept my existence because of my religion, 

that even though I was born and raised on Saudi soil, I am prohibited from claiming the country in more than just name,

that my parents lived and worked there for nearly 25 years and only saw the families they left behind in Kerala once a year in order to follow the terms of their visas, 

that it is no secret that foreigners in Saudi Arabia are accorded respect depending on skin color and citizenship? 

How do I show her that while she feels a sense of nostalgia when she thinks of Dubai’s beaches and the parties that were thrown by her fellow “expat” youth, 

I am still, 13 years later in my new home, struggling to shake the trauma of being jolted awake by the religious police turning our apartment over for any signs of religious paraphernalia?

I choose not to tell her about the 2004 terrorist attack in Al-Khobar, which occurred at a factory 30 minutes away from the school my brother and I attended in Dammam. I choose not to tell her about the foreign migrant workers who were massacred. I choose not to tell her that these workers shared everything in common with my own father except for his luck, which caused his worker’s visa to expire and led him to get on a plane back to India one month before the attack.

Instead, I scramble to match her excitement before conceding, “Yeah! I’m a third culture kid.”   

Jennifer Koshy immigrated with her family to Houston in 2004, and 16 years later, is proud of her identity as an American who was born in Saudi Arabia to Malayalee parents. She studies Anthropology and Women’s Studies at the University of Houston. This August she will be participating in SAYHU’s 4th annual Summer Institute.