Finding Home

Erin O'Brien's home is crammed with books. They spill out of every corner, stacked on shelves, bursting out of drawers - a wide collection that spans academica, queer literature, feminism and cooking.

The reason behind the multitude of her collection is simple.

"Books were one thing I wasn't allowed to keep when we moved as a kid," she said.

Her collection is an establishment of rootedness, an evasive concept in a life spent moving between more than 10 countries.

"I'm really not from anywhere, which is what I tell most people. It freaks Americans out because it's so ambiguous," she laughed.

O'Brien is the definition of the global nomad, a member of a specific community that spent their formative years growing up between different countries.

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It was a group that went unnamed until the early '50s, when sociologist Dr. Ruth Hill Useem coined the term "Third Culture Kids" (TCKs) to refer to a citizenry that belonged everywhere and nowhere.

While third culture kids are usually the children of military workers, missionaries or diplomatic families, the expatriate community is wide and varied. Each experience is unique, but tied together by common threads: the loss of a stable home and sense of a single identity.

This is attributed to the lack of a stable foundation in the formative years of life, a time critical to development, according to Myra Dumapias.

A social worker that has done extensive research on the third culture experience, Dumapias grew up between Asia, Europe and North America. The ages of 1-6 form the basis of cultural knowledge, behaviour and a concrete sense of belonging- a stability is shattered by third culture kids' many moves between different countries, cultures and ways of functioning, Dumapias said.

"A lot of what you see [in terms of upbringing] is based on monocultural models. For TCKs there are no consistent role-models or a consistent environment. You don't have roots," she said.

Negotiating an identity is what Dumapias hoped to do with TCKid Now, a nonprofit dedicated to providing resources and support to a global network of third culture kids.

Dumapias serves as CEO of the organization. She began creating content for their YouTube channel, where she interviewed other third culture kids about their journeys.

Dumapias noticed that when people told their stories, it was the a means of reconciliation: of who they were and where they came from.

In a world where "who you are doesn't fit into neat boxes," as Dumapias said, third culture kids are gravitating towards various forms of art and performance to confront their identities.

She termed this form of catharsis as a kind of "narrative-based therapy." "It's about being name to name your grief, name your losses and name your story," she said.

THE TASTE OF HOME

O'Brien's story is testament to this.

Her first exposure to telling stories was through the characters she played in American musicals like Annie at her international school- a bubble of Americana in the midst of Damascus, Syria.

Since then, her art manifested in many ways, but it was only when she met Japanese-American performance artist Denise Uyehara that she came to a crucial realization.

Uyehara's work spoke of existing among worlds, cultures and races, a story O'Brien instantly gravitated to.

"I was floored. I thought, 'here's a name for what I want to do, it's called performance.'"

The experiences of being a third culture kid have been played a significant part in her food performance work, where she tries to curate the taste of home. "Home is not a place," she said. "It's more ephemeral. It's a taste, it's a memory, it's a ghost."

Her performance pieces seek to emphasize just that. Her food series is titled to the point: Home.

"I do a performance where someone hosts at their house and I come and I cook a meal that reminds me of home. It could be anything that I'm in the mood for, grilled cheeses or whatever," she explained.

She recalled her performance of a Saigon sloppy joe, inspired by the memories of her mother making them for "American day" at her American international school in Syria.

"The performance dinner was Sloppy joes made with pork and more Vietnamese flavours, and I served it in three ways," she said. "You could have it in a pita, Syrian style, or with Vietnamese banh mi bread, or American hamburger bun."

The crux of her performances are "a convergence of places that exist in my memories," and most importantly, "the endeavor and failure to try and capture what you can't catch. Because I've never had a place called home," O'Brien said.

A CITIZEN OF EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

The need to evoke home through storytelling manifested differently for Elizabeth Liang, a Los Angeles based actor and third culture kid. Her father's job at Xerox meant the family moved between the United States, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East.

Her series of journeys is synonymous with the title of the play she wrote, acted in and produced - "Alien Citizen."

Theater was the first sense of home Liang found between the many transitions. American by nationality, she'd spent a few years as a teenager in Connecticut, before leaving the United States for Morocco.

Here's what home means to Elizabeth Liang.
Photo by Hafsa Fathima

She returned as an undergraduate at Wellesley College, a move was more a culture shock than homecoming.

"I thought it would have evolved and progressed and all the racial strife would have just changed," she said of her expectations of American society. "All the microaggressions, the people being mean and just barely polite for no apparent reason. I thought that had would have stopped."

Liang dealt with her cultural disassication by trying to pretend she was fine, staying in her dorm and grappling with an eating disorder.

When she found a theater community at Wellesley, she said the discovery "saved" her.

Through acting, she found the first way to tell her story, bringing her out of the "zombie-like shell" she'd retreated into - a consequence of not fitting in or identifying with mainstream American culture.

While she found a voice telling the stories of others on stage, "Alien Citizen" was exclusively hers.

On the surface, the play encapsulates what it means to be a dual citizen of mixed race that speaks five languages and grows up in six countries. At its core, however, it is being able to find a uinique selfhood when defined by a number of different places and cultures.

"It's being able express yourself about the painful things that other people - especially parents - might not want to hear about," Liang said. "You are then able to feel all the feelings. If you numb yourself and don't let yourself express or feel the painful feelings, then you're not really going to feel the happiness, the joy or the wonder. You have to give yourself permission to feel the pain."

Theater was the first means of reconciling the loss of stability and a rooted home. Liang's most recent project, a series of writing workshops, help other third culture kids navigate through similar emotions.

Liang envisioned these workshops to be a space where third culture kids could express their intercultural experiences without being questioned. Sessions begin with a writing prompt that can be deeply evocative of the global nomadic experience.

"They're open ended and go straight to people's guts," she said. "'Write about what got left behind. You have five minutes.' And anything could come up. Anything," Liang said.

Her third culture kid clients realize that their own storytelling is a means to cope with their own loss of home and a stable identity.

"I'll be the one saying 'Tell me more, tell me more,' ...It can be scary to go into it, but it's on the page now. It's not turning away or festering or dying in your gut...It's out of you now, which is therapeutic."

Through their writings, Liang observed, third culture kid clients often came to the realization that they had no solid home, and with it, a sense of acceptance.

FINDING A VOICE

The arts have been a gateway to reconciling an intercultural identity and forming pride in it, according to Naren Weiss, a New York based actor.

Here's what home means to Naren Weiss.
Photo courtesy of Jorge Luna

The son of a Caucasian-American father and an Indian mother, Weiss spent his childhood growing up between the United States and India. Like Liang, a homecoming wasn't immediate for him in either country.

The family moved to Chennai, India, when he was in middle school. Weiss embarked on a mission to fit it: speaking Tamil, the regional language, taking congested trains and buses - anything to "live local."

"It was kind of a study of contradictions where people were expecting to see one thing and I was determined not to give that to them and to go in the other direction," Weiss said.

His attempts at immersion were not always well-recognized.

"A bunch of us were watching Russell Peters at someone's house, and he said, 'To all my brown people out there. I'm very sorry, but I'm going to let them in on the Indian secret.'' And I said, 'It's all right, man.' to the screen," Weiss recalled. "Everyone just kind of went deathly silence and turned to look at me and someone went, 'You're white, dude.'"

Returning to the United States for university didn't offer an immediate sense of home either.

Weiss was drawn to the lure of New York City to study acting, but still struggled with the crux of being an insider on the outside.

In the course of his study, he met a South African professor named Judylee Vivier who fast became his mentor. From Vivier, he learned the first step was to finding a voice was to cultivate one that was "neither Americanized or Indianized, just honest."

Weiss realized that as an actor he couldn't authentically portray other characters' story without coming to terms with his own.

"The first thing I learned is that it has to be rooted in honesty," he said of his first trainings at school. "We were not asked to nullify our previous experiences."

The diversity of his upbringing added to his performance, Weiss recalled Vivier teaching him.

"She pretty much said, 'No, we're going to keep you as you are, because you bring something here, and we'll build that up.'"

Acting was a natural offset of embodying two different cultural roles throughout his life. As his time in theater grew, so did the need to confront the many facets of his identity.

"I found out where my gaping holes were," he said. "It was with regards to who I am and where I'm from and was what that means in the greater context." A sense of comfort in his self steadily grew into the acceptance that, "I don't have to be one or the other. I can be neither, I can be me."

Dumapias' TCKid Now has seen many mechanisms of coping with the complexities of being a Third Culture Kid, but said that storytelling will always come to the forefront.

"That's what I always end my videos with," she said. "'Keep smiling, because you have a tribe. Keep telling your story.'"