Passing Through Shanghai: Ethnographic Insights into the Mobile Lives of Expatriate Youths

Front matter

PASSING THROUGH SHANGHAI

Ethnographic Insights into the Mobile Lives of Expatriate Youths

Marie Sander

Introduction

Is Paul a “Third Culture Kid?” Ethnographic approaches to young expatriates iVe Sisirin aE sees sues seinen E Er aa How does being young shape the expatriation experience?

How can we understand the cultural entanglements of Paul's world? Transculturality as progress, practice, and perspective oo... eects Why are spatial practices insightful? Tracing the importance of place .... The structure Of this book 0... ce esesseeeseneeseseeeeeeeseseeeeseeeessseseeeesacsecaeaeseees Part I: Getting Atguainted.an.eennee u 2: “GOING LO SCHOO lis feted ccaleciplessdeensasecosadpscestaseededs caavsplessenantacedenseseacoesedses

3.1 Fieldwork with “the girls:” real ambitions and fake

3.2 Fieldwork with “the boys:” repulsive moments and

4.1 Antonia: I consider myself Shanghainese, but others

4.2 Bjorn: Shanghai is the best thing that can happen to you,

4.3 Arnaud: When you are in-between, you can't be the best

5. The Common Ground: Capturing the Heterogeneous

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Parell-Lesyingese ser ee eo Oe 1. Retrospectives on the Decision to Move 2... ceescecesseeeteeeeeeeeeseeees 1.2 Family relations and the idea of “best interest”... Part IEATRIVINO Saar ee 1.1 Navigating the City... csseseseeeeseseseeeteeesseseseeessesecasseeeees 1.2:.xSensingthedity 1.22. nenne 2.1 Gated community LIVING... eee eeeseseceeseeeeeeeeseseseeecseeetaeaees 2.3 (Trans)local ties: theorizing students’ negotiations 3. Community: The Role of International Schools „sesser 3.2 Image and community ....eesesssesenenesenennenennenenenenenennnensnnenannn 3.5 Concluding thoughts on “expatriateness” and the role Of SCHOOIS sssessesiechisedscensspetsrstescucgevassesnaqaceessaseongesegstsncoossseoasesuanses Part IV LIVING een 1.1 Wrong time to move, right time to be there... 1.3 Rejecting “old people"—claiming spaces... 2. Nightlife: Going OUt we eecceeseeceeseesesceseseeecseeeecaeeecseeecseeeesaeereaeeees 2.2 Open doors and open bars: negotiating access and Barental CONCEP Meissie nn iN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2.4 Staging youth culture: concluding thoughts on nightlife practices aoe iira eaei ARSS a AEE ae in Saa 235

3.2 “The shop is not expat:” The shop as an in-between space 239 3.3 “The shop is somewhat like a park:” The shop as an open

3.4 Concluding thoughts on the SHOP ..ssssssssssssessssssesesssssesreeseseses 247 4. “Guests Stay Guests:” The Lack of “Local” Friends „eessen 248 4.1 Autonomous and special? The demarcation of the expatriate COMMUNILY .essssssseseesesesesrsreresesestenererrereseresesenereenese 250 4.2 "We don't fit in:” The gaze of the "other"... 255 4.3 Barriers to “integration,” or, the difficulties of making

4.4 Youths’ perceptions of local attitudes towards foreigners ... 266 4.5 Concluding thoughts on the local-expat youth divide in Shanghai eoseid sederet ean ia aie n ainni a a 272

Part V: Moving Onzesees ee ee 275

1.3 Moving on: anticipation and anxieties „eseese 287

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Paul's Experience Growing up on the Move: Combining Ethnographic and Transcultural Approaches

in Expatriate Youth Research

It is Saturday afternoon and seventeen-year-old Paul is sitting opposite me at a café on Wulumuqi Road in downtown Shanghai. Below our window, buses, taxis, honking electric scooters, and pedestrians carrying umbrellas to shield off the sun pass by until they disappear into the narrow, sycamore-tree-lined streets of the former French concession. Inside, the air conditioning is humming and music is playing in the background, while Paul, who has been introduced to me as an “American student” by our common acquaintance Matthias, shares his story of growing up on the move. Paul is a German national, born in Brazil to a Brazilian mother and a German father. He grew up in Brazil and the United States and moved to Shanghai six years prior to the interview. Here, he is enrolled in one of Shanghai’s American schools. Learning that his father is German, like me, I wonder if we should switch to my native language for the interview. Noticing my general difficulty comprehending the many moves, places, tongues, and people that he references, Paul helps by clarifying his language skills:

PAUL: I speak Portuguese, I don’t speak German. My mom is Brazilian. INTERVIEWER: Your mom is Brazilian, your dad is German, but you grew up in America?

PAUL: And China. And Brazil. But I speak very little German. I can understand it. Okay. But I can't speak it really. I can say like: hello, thank you, please. <L>.'

As I listen to his account of the many moves and languages to which he has already been exposed at his young age, I begin to understand that Paul can hardly be sufficiently represented by the label “American student” that I had assigned to him before our encounter. His experiences include growing up on the move in a bi-national family. His and his parents’ nationalities, languages, and cultural practices differ both from those of his school and from his country of residence. Until recently, he never lived in Germany, the country that issued his passport, nor does he speak the language that it is written in. He has limited Chinese language skills and few contacts to

1 Foran explanation of the interview transcript abbreviations used throughout this work, see Appendix A.

PAUL'S EXPERIENCE GROWING UP ON THE MOVE locals of his age because activities and friendships outside of Jingiao,? or the expatriate “bubble” as he calls it, are rare.? His description of this “bubble” is reminiscent of the accounts by mobile professionals’ transnational practices summarized by cultural and urban geographer David Ley:

Foreshortened time and space create a circumscribed lifeworld around work, bars, and sporting and expatriate clubs. [...] The outcome is a lifeworld that is the opposite of the expansive and inclusive networks implied by ungrounded or deterritorialized networks. Instead, the social geography of the transnational elite may be highly localized, restricted to particular territories. As they are dispatched internationally from city to city, the transnational capitalist class are island hopping from one expatriate enclave to another (Ley 2004, 157).

Paul seems to have mastered this art of “island hopping,” of finding a place in expatriate communities as a way of coping with growing up transnationally. He is not alone. As my own descriptions of the spatial practices of expatriate youths will demonstrate, this “island hopping” that Ley describes is a very location-based practice involving very concrete sites.

Paul's experience of mobility, shifting borders, and differences is one of the most extreme among the expatriate youths I encountered. His situation of living in China, being born in Brazil and speaking Portuguese at home, having lived and been educated in the United States, yet being German according to his passport are hard to grasp for me during our first encounter. Paul seems unsurprised by my confusion and by being labeled differently depending on his place of birth, country of upbringing, or passport. When we talk about his private, Christian, American school in Shanghai, for instance, he mentions that, including himself, only two Europeans are currently enrolled. Just hearing him label himself “European” in a perfect American accent, when he has never even lived in Europe, is surprising. Paul's particularly flexible way of positioning himself in terms of national or cultural identity clearly depends on his point of reference (schooling, passport, family ties) and seems to respond to different labels others appoint to him.

How do young people like Paul deal with a frequently changing environment and how do they manage such varied and shifting sources of cultural identity? This ethnographic study addresses this question by exploring the everyday lives of expatriate youths in general and Paul’s and

2 Jingiao is the district where Paul lives. It is located in the eastern suburbs of Shanghai and, with its Western food supermarkets, restaurants, and villa housing, seems to represent for Paul the physical manifestation of the expatriate community.

3 Fechter (2007a) also encountered the term “bubble’—among other metaphors, such as “bunker,” “hothouse,” “ghetto,” and “Disneyland”—during ethnographic fieldwork among western expatriates in Jakarta, Indonesia, who used the term to describe their residential compounds.

his peers’ own perspectives in particular. I am interested in foreign students’ experiences of living abroad in Shanghai, their age-specific views on growing up on the move, and their notions of “home.” Their stories raise important questions about our understanding of national or cultural identity and ways of belonging. Their experiences illustrate that common notions of either are often too limited to capture the cultural complexities in the lives of youths who have spent most of their childhood outside the country that issued their passports. Some of them, like Paul, were born into a bi-national marriage and, while living abroad, might wonder which of their parents’ cultural frameworks seems most applicable, or has had the most influence on them. Others attend an international school that teaches in a language other than the one they speak at home or in the streets, which requires a significant linguistic flexibility. Still others have parents who have migrant backgrounds themselves. Their children’s stories show that it is too simple to assume that, for instance, a child born to Chinese parents in France, who is “returning” to China and attending a French school, could simply feel “Chinese.” Furthermore, someone who is fifteen and has moved five times across national borders might question if a current place of residence can actually still provide some form of belonging or cultural identity.

These scenarios show that Paul and his peers are, despite their youth, experts on the effects and challenges of migration. By studying their stories and everyday practices, I want to understand which competencies and strategies are important for young people moving globally. In short, this ethnography traces what it means to pass through Shanghai—to move to the city and leave it again within a few years—and to actively cope with the experiences that go along with it.

Increasingly, expatriate communities and international schools around the globe answer Paul's and his peers’ questions about the effects of moving and negotiating cultural identity by referring to Pollock and Van Reken's ([1999] 2009) concept of “Third Culture Kids.” The concept addresses one aspect of expatriate lives that my fieldwork and in-depth interviews with expatriate youths will also reveal: despite all its privileges and opportunities, growing up “on the move” and/or in a transient space demands that these children constantly cope with changes, loss, and questions of belonging and identity.

“IS PAUL A THIRD CULTURE KID?”

Is Paul a “Third Culture Kid?”

Ethnographic approaches to young expatriates’ lives

Well-received and popular among—at least Anglophone—expatriate circles today, the concept of “Third Culture Kids” (TCKs) was originally introduced by John Useem and Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s (see Pollock and Van Reken [1999] 2009, 20; Knörr 2005, 53; Richter 2011, 20). Studying American families living and working in India, the researchers described the parents’ home culture as the first culture and the culture of the place of residence as the second culture. “The ‘Third Culture’ to them was the culture of the expatriate community, which they understood as a ‘culture between cultures’ integrating cultural features of home and host societies” (Knörr 2005, 53). Later, Ruth Van Reken and David Pollock's ([1999] 2009) book Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds helped the concept gain immense popularity. Their work sets out to be a self-help book for members of expatriate communities and their ideas have been developed further in various (parental) guidebooks (see for instance Pascoe 2006; Pittman and Smit 2012), on special website forums dedicated to TCKs, as well as in the expatriate press circulating in Shanghai, such as That's Shanghai and City Weekend. The common definition of the term is as follows:

A third culture kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background (Pollock and Van Reken [1999] 2009, 19).

The findings of these studies, guidebooks, magazines, and websites (with a focus on Western children) discuss how a life outside the parents’ home country and particularly a lifestyle of constant moving affects children. TCKs are represented as a group sharing many qualities, despite growing up in different countries. Pollock and Van Reken ([1999] 2009, 39) argue that “for TCKs the moving back and forth from one culture to another happens before they have completed the critical developmental task of forming a sense of their own personal or cultural identity.” This quote reveals the container-like, or as Homi Bhabha ([1996] 2012, 53) has put it, “absurd notion of an uncontaminated culture in a single country,” that seems to occasionally underlie the reasoning behind the TCK concept. Based on such a notion of culture, Pollock and Van Reken see how the children’s upbringing results in “the paradoxical nature of the TCK experience—the sense of being profoundly connected yet simultaneously disconnected with people and places around the world” (Pollock and Van Reken [1999] 2009, 38). Problems associated with belonging and identity formation are presented as central for TCKs. These problems, Pollock and Van Reken argue, are due to “an interplay of these factors—living in both a culturally changing and highly mobile world during the formative years” (ibid., 39). The general idea of development and identity formation underlying all these arguments—that adults possess a stable identity, while children are still developing and something of adults-in-the-making—has been criticized by many scholars on youth in other disciplines (see for instance Bucholtz 2002; Hirschfeld 2002).

Pollock and Van Reken, as well as authors following the TCK tradition like Robin Pascoe (2006), also see other specific, common challenges that many TCKs face, such as issues of relational patterns (Pollock and Van Reken [1999] 2009, 131-143), “unresolved grief” (ibid., 165-182), “uneven maturity” and “delayed adolescence,” or “delayed adolescent rebellion” (Pollock and Van Reken 150-158 and Pascoe, 25). They also describe the benefits of being a TCK, such as having an “expanded worldview” (Pollock and Van Reken [1999] 2009, 79-80), and well-developed “cross-cultural skills” (ibid., 107-110), “observational skills” (ibid., 112-110), “social skills” (ibid., 112-114), and “linguistic skills” (ibid., 114-118). Concerning the relational patterns, the frequent experience of goodbyes, according to Pollock and Van Reken, can sometimes lead to “patterns of protecting themselves” (ibid., 131) and struggles with a “fear of intimacy because of the fear of loss” (ibid., 139). But the authors also describe how TCKs “will go to greater lengths than some people might consider normal to nurture relational ties with others” (ibid., 131). TCKs, according to them, place a high value on their relationships and often jump into “deeper levels of relationship” (ibid., 136). Unresolved grief is another issue that Pollock and Van Reken address, an issue that is related to losses expatriate children experience by moving. However, these losses are often hidden and unrecognized for a variety of reasons. The authors also attest that an “uneven maturity” troubles TCKs. Although their experience with TCKs often lead adults to view them as extremely mature—a maturity and comfort level with adults that most TCKs also perceive in themselves (ibid., 151), according to Pollock and Van Reken—few spaces are available for TCKs “to test rules during their teenage years” (ibid., 152). TCKs are therefore often unsure of which norms to rebel against. This uncertainty can lead to a postponed rebellion that usually manifests itself later, in college. The benefits of TCK life, including the expanded worldview and the well-developed skills mentioned above, are linked to the experience of differences and having to learn how to deal with them through observation and adaptation.

Although it appeared in 1999, Pollock and Van Reken’s book is based on surveys that were conducted in the early and mid-1980s with adults aged twenty-two to twenty-seven, who were asked to reflect upon their childhood and the impact that moving had on their lives. These “kids,” in other words, were mainly born in the 1960s. Processes of globalization and the spread and gaining influence of media and communication technologies have surely led to changes in the experience of growing up abroad

“IS PAUL A THIRD CULTURE KID?”

since then. More current results, based on an online survey,’ are offered in the self-help book Expat Teens Talk (Pittman and Smit 2012). The book collects answers from parents, counselors, and other TCKs to questions the authors received from expat teens. Consequently, their approach only presents advice with very limited insight into expatriate youths’ daily practices and social worlds.

Such everyday experiences, however, explain how children and teenagers cope with moving, and how they create world-views and ways of belonging within certain communities, cultural environments, or nations. Paul, for instance, excitedly talks about having met our common acquaintance Matthias during various nightlife activities and how he eventually started hanging out with him. They became friends, played music together, and founded a band which, however, no longer exists, due to difficulties they had arranging practice sessions (the students live one and a half hours apart by car or metro). It becomes clear, though, that nightlife practices, hobbies, and friendships significantly impact Paul's and his fellow expatriate teenagers’ Shanghai experiences.

Ethnographic works on expatriates have attempted to capture such practices and to examine the daily lives of expatriates. They include research conducted in the 1970s, such as Dennison Nash's (1970) A Community in Limbo and research by Erik Cohen (1977). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, research into expatriates’ everyday practices and forms of privileged migration became a strong field of study (among others: Beaverstock 2002; Willis, Yeoh, and Fakhri 2002; Willis and Yeoh 2002; Yeoh and Willis 2005; Fechter 2007b; Coles and Fechter 2008; Butcher 2009; Hindman 2009a; Hindman 2009b; Dobeneck 2010; Farrer 2010; Farrer 2011). Books such as Anne Coles and Anne-Meike Fechter's (2008) Gender and Family Among Transnational Professionals and Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement edited by Vered Amit (2007), exemplify this recent focus: they analyze everyday spaces outside the multinational companies where most expatriates work and also highlight the particular role of women, who are not themselves employed by the multinational companies, but accompany their spouses abroad. In the wake of these edited volumes, a range of articles has appeared, usually focusing on specific practices of privileged migrants.? In the context of this increase in

4 The average expat teen respondent, according to their data from 248 questionnaires, is fifteen years old, has lived in three countries, has attended four schools, and speaks two languages fluently. Based on the questionnaires, the authors also offer lists of issues expatriate teenagers have most questions about (top issue: “general worries/concerns/fears”), experimental behaviors they engage in (top behavior: “drinking alcohol”), and things they worry most about (top: “grades”) (ibid., 175-176).

5 Geographer Georg Glasze (2006), for instance, brings the particularities of expatriate housing practices to the fore, describing the role of gated communities among expatriates in Saudi Arabia. Katie Walsh (2006a; 2006b; 2008; 2011) focuses on British expatriate identities in Dubai, examining cultural practices of domesticity, intimacy, and consequent articulations of belonging and national identity. Heather Hindman (2009a; 2009b) pays detailed attention to the meaning-laden empirical works on expatriate communities, Fechter and Walsh (2010) discuss the necessity for further theoretical conceptualizations of expatriates, calling for an integration and inclusion of studies on mobile professionals into mainstream migration studies. They propose linking the subject theoretically with postcolonial theory, consequently integrating both topics. Integrating research on expatriates into migration studies, so the argument goes, is necessary to contest limited notions of migration processes and images of migrants. Although many of these qualitative research projects take ethnic, racial, and particularly gendered experiences of privileged migration into account, most neglect the age-specific experiences of children and adolescents. With the exception of Danau Tanu’s (2011) work on an international school in Indonesia and Fiona Moore's (2008) contribution to Coles and Fechter’s volume on gender and family (2008), which investigates the role of the German school for the German community in London, none of the publications have particularly focused on expatriate youth. Even Moore's contribution does not center on the children’s point of view.

While these ethnographic works lack expatriate youths’ own perspectives, TCK studies focus on that age group but lack contextualized, detailed ethnographic descriptions. All these guidebooks, Pollock and Van Reken's Third Culture Kids, Pascoe’s Raising Global Nomads (2006), and Pittman and Smit’s Expat Teens Talk (2012), are written from within the community and offer to help expatriate youths facing problems of belonging and identity by establishing a feeling of community. Based on activity of shopping for expatriate women in Nepal and reveals that behind the shopping for art objects and an interest in cuisine lies the need for easily transferable elements in a world of constant movement. Food and art, unlike language skills and local friendships, “can be utilized as anecdotal parallels in future postings” (Hindman 2009a, 256). The collected objects at the next destination “act as means of transferring knowledge and status between locations” (Hindman 2009b, 676), helping the expatriate women to recreate themselves. Willis and Yeoh (2002; 2005) contribute a comparative angle, writing on British and Singaporean Expatriates in Hong Kong and China based on material from 247 interviews that were conducted between 1997 and 2001. They also provide insight into the gendered experiences of privileged migration, a perspective they pursue further in their article on single British migrants in China (Willis and Yeoh 2008).

James Farrer (2008; 2010; 2011) examines expatriates’ nightlife activities, sexuality, and intermarriage and their relevance to encounters with the “local” in Shanghai. In addition to his emphasis on the interaction with “locals,” Farrer also broadens the view on expatriates themselves by investigating foreigners in Shanghai who stay longer than five years. Foregrounding their narratives of emplacement, he questions the standard “equation of expatriates with highly mobile transnational elites” (2010, 15) and points out the increasing diversity of the expatriate community in social composition.

In addition to these writings with their particular foci, two complete ethnographies focusing on two distinct expatriate communities have appeared. Fechter’s (2007b) Transnational Lives: Expatriates in Indonesia and Von Dobeneck's (2010) work Mobile Eliten. Deutsche Entsandte und ihre Familien in SGo Paulo, on German expatriates in Säo Paulo, both give detailed insights into expatriate communities’ structures and everyday practices. Anne-Meike Fechter’s work particularly concentrates on the boundaries present in expatriate life in Indonesia.

“IS PAUL A THIRD CULTURE KID?”

these publications, the concept of TCK was also used and promoted in Shanghai's expatriate community centers and by school counselors. The author Ruth Van Reken had even given a talk at Paul’s school. It is this reinforcement of the sense of belonging to a special TCK, Global Nomad, or expat community that the guidebooks and the talks in Shanghai promote that raised my awareness of something I call “TCK nationalism.” This “TCK nationalism” offers a simplified form of belonging for what is otherwise a complex phenomenon and attracts individuals through its rhetoric, clear definitions of insiders and outsiders, and feelings of superiority.

Talking to Paul and other students, I find it difficult to see their flexible and reflexive ways of negotiating identity as claiming clear belonging “in relationship to others of similar background” (see Pollock and Van Reken [1999] 2009, 19). In other words, as simply being a TCK. During our first encounter, Paul seems to make very few claims of belonging at all. Home is a rather vague idea to him which he reluctantly refers to as “wherever I am staying.” When he describes his multi-local experiences, it is almost a non-attachment to places and people that comes to the fore. This adjustable idea of home also relates to his particularly flexible and ever-shifting way of positioning himself in terms of cultural identity depending on the point of reference. I argue that it is therefore clearly necessary to complicate and critically reinvestigate the TCK issue outside of the guidebook phenomenon to further understand Paul’s and other expatriate youths’ ways of situating and comprehending themselves in a world that is in constant flux.

While some academics (see Selmer and Lam 2004; Franke 2008; Grimshaw and Sears 2008; Greenholtz and Kim 2009; Peterson and Plamondon 2009; Walters and Auton-Cuff 2009; Richter 2011) have readily taken up the TCK category, Danau Tanu’s (2011) article, “Vignettes from Another Perspective: When Cultural Hierarchies Matter at an International School,” is one of the few ethnographic works that questions this approach. Tanu updates and complicates some of the dynamics described in the standard works on TCKs, criticizing former research for its limited perspective— mostly Western researchers conducting studies on Western participants— that is likely to overlook how “race, ethnicity, culture, finances and even the name of the country on our passport(s) impact upon our access to global mobility, ability to feel at home in different places, and the way others relate to us” (2011, 224). Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork at an international school in Indonesia, Tanu’s accounts show how cultural hierarchies are prominent not only outside, but also inside international schools.° Tanu's study highlights an aspect of my own ethnographic work:

6 Tanu’s study reveals that different labels, such as “Indonesian” or “White”—that seem to be linked rather to a native English speaker status and mannerisms than to actual physical appearance (ibid., 230)—are prominent in everyday discussions at school. While for the school administrators “the ideal student is in the ‘global citizen’,” many of the students with Asian backgrounds are seen as that expatriate youth—although often forming a notion of “we”—are a heterogeneous group. This group, as Tanu demonstrates, has inner divisions and hierarchies:

Money and cultural hierarchies influence perceptions and interactions that take place on the campus. Racial and other identity labels are sometimes used to signify status and cultural difference, but their meanings constantly shift. Various forms of social assets, such as language, accents, mannerisms, and money, are used to make and vie for status (Tanu 2011, 231).

Tanu explains how these hierarchies influence familial relationships and peer as well as student-teacher relations at the international school campus. International school culture, she claims, is often westernized. For students with Asian backgrounds “cultural dissonance” may arise between “Western’ culture by day and ‘Asian’ culture by night” (ibid., 223). Tanu finds that, in describing feelings of “cultural dissonance,” previous analyses of TCKs only address repatriation or “life after the expatriate microcosm”—life after the “bubble,” as student Paul phrased it. Observing these feelings (and, I would add, the need to creatively cope with the different cultural worlds at home and at school), Tanu witnesses “similar, though not identical” experiences of “Asian” TCKs and those “of second generation immigrants growing up in Western countries” (ibid., 223). These migrant groups have seldom been put in the same context. Anthropologist Jacqueline Knörr (2005) even criticizes the TCK concept for reinforcing this gap between “immigrants growing up in Western countries” and those treated as TCKs. While Tanu's work has revealed the heterogeneity of TCKs, urging for a more sensitive look at the divisions within the TCK community, Knorr (2005) takes her criticism of the TCK concept even further.

Knorr (2005, 54) notes that Pollock and Van Reken have broadened the definition of the term to include “all children who move into another society with their parents,” thus making TCK too wide a term that no longer allows for distinguishing between “a Sierra Leonean refugee in the United States and an American son of an ambassador somewhere in Africa.” Knorr, an anthropologist, takes a long overdue critical stance against the TCK concept and rightly points out that this broadening of the concept covers up ideologies connected with the TCK approach and remains associated primarily with “Western children brought up in the so-called Third World” and not to immigrant children in Europe or the USA (ibid.). She criticizes the concept of TCK as an ideology that implicitly reinforces qualify-

“add[ing] to the school's overall sense of visible diversity,” while “fall[ing] short on being ‘international” (ibid.). Internationalism renders the dominant Western culture invisible, establishing hierarchies of who is or is not “international.” In Tanu’s words: “International schools may be a multicultural bubble, but it is a bubble that is not immune to the dynamics at work in the world outside the school gates” (ibid., 231).

“IS PAUL A THIRD CULTURE KID?”

ing distinctions between TCKs (Western Children) and other (im)migrants, as well as between TCKs and the population in the “home country.” On this point, she argues:

Whereas the upper class of young, mostly Western migrants to— mainly—Third World countries are likely to be considered “Third Culture Kids,“ producing creatively a culture for themselves, the lower classes of young migrants—those from Third World or poorer countries migrating or fleeing to mostly Western countries—are likely to be considered immigrants with a cultural background, which does not fit their new environment and thus produce problems for themselves and their host society. There is an implicit—and qualifying— distinction made between TCKs on the one hand and other young (im)migrants on the other. With regard to the former, (appropriate) cultural creativity is emphasized; with regard to the latter (inappropriate) cultural conservatism. Academic approaches thereby largely and mostly implicitly reflect the—usually not so implicit—qualifying distinctions made in society at large (Knörr 2005, 54).

Knorr succinctly points out the differences in everyday life, as well as in academic discourse, when it comes to the discussion of issues of cultural practices or cultural identities among privileged migrants—expatriate youths—and migrants coming to Western countries—immigrant youths. Whereas the “cultural background” of migrant youths in Germany, for example, is seen to cause problems, expatriate youths—TCKs—are associated with cultural creativity. While I acknowledge the “appropriate cultural creativity” of the TCK concept and how it might help expatriate youths to realize that they are not the only ones with such experiences—especially after a move “back home”—I nevertheless agree with Knörr's position. One way to save this well-meaning concept of TCKs, which acknowledges creativity and offers support through creating a like-minded community from its “ideology of difference,” is a radical extension of its use: the term TCK does not need to be reserved for qualifying Western expatriates alone. If the label were broadened to include all migrant youths, it could help acknowledge the full range of their creative practices and their universal potential to create “Third Cultures.” When capturing immigrant youths’ experiences in Europe or the USA for instance, I suggest linking the TCK concept to approaches in postcolonial studies, such as Homi Bhabha’s ([1994] 2009) metaphor of the “Third Space” that describes a chaotic meeting space, “the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space” (ibid., 56), where migrants discuss and create multiple new meanings and cultural affiliations. The TCK idea can help simplify or ground the cultural creativity that lies in such concepts as Bhabha’s. However, as my own empirical focus on privileged migration is too specific to meaningfully contribute to such a broadening, and as the concept, in my view, still contains ideologies of difference in its usage, I refrain from using it in this study.