Raised in Narnia. Back to London.
The strange life of a third culture kid that never really leaves you.
I didn’t climb into a closet during a game of hide and seek to discover a new wintery world with odd talking creatures. I might as well have. I was born in another land but I don’t remember that of course. None of us do. I’m half of that land and half of another so I automatically stick out without intention in the first. To keep this illustration going, I was dropped off at a house in London, away from the cottages and castles of where I was born. London was what I knew. I did London things. I spoke London English. I had London friends. It was good for me because children need a sense of belonging and connection to where they are. And then, like a right of passage at 13, I was summoned back to my birth place of Narnia.
As I’ve gotten older, I realize that this is the best way to describe it. I understand that most would not care. People move all the time, get on with it. I imagine that’s how it was for the main characters in CS Lewis’s children stories.
“You don’t understand! There’s a whole world out there! It exists, I swear it does!” One child may shout but London keeps on pushing forward as it’s always done. The children can only talk about their experience amongst themselves and what’s really the point? The closet no longer opens back to that place; a place that was uniquely for them and yet uniquely not. As one grows into an adult, that land that is reserved as a memory for children and no longer allows the unbelieving adult through its gates. It has closed forever.
From age 13 to 19 I was trapped in a world that was not my own. I was a visitor silently observing the life of people who fit. After Narnia, (which was not at all Narnia but a place called Japan) was closed off to an aging spectator, I thought the natural evolution would be of course to return to my life in London, (which was not London but Seattle). You see, when you’re in Narnia you many times wish for home but somewhere along the way it becomes home. When you leave Narnia, you find that the home you once longed for no longer exists. After Narnia is a strange middle. After all, it was Narnia that developed me into what I am. Those are formidable years. For example, I learned how to adapt in Japan. I learned that there is something to their famous saying, “a nail that sticks out gets hammered down,” but how do you take that into another land where the subtleties are not admired? All the things learned in another country may be completely overridden in another.
The lives of many third culture kids exists in that strange portal between one land and another. How do we fit, when like a puzzle piece, our corners are not cut with the standards of a certain region? Perhaps we feel like we are the stray piece that got put into a box by mistake. Yet what I am finding after nearly 20 years away from Narnia is that it’s okay to be a puzzle piece with strange grooves because we can fit anywhere if we must. Maybe it’s just for a little while. Maybe it’s to help other pieces find their way. Maybe it really is to be the extra piece in the box that finds a home in observation. Whatever the case, it’s okay to stick out. My first language of adaptation sometimes conflicts with such a thought. I observe so that I can fit but time has taught me that I don’t need to. We can be content with our strange grooves. Many times, great solutions come outside of the box.
If you’d like to read more about the TCCK experience, you can check it out here on Kindle.