The Grown-Up TCK* in the Workplace

*third culture kid – a kid who has grown up in one or more countries that have a different culture to those of their parents… ish. Feel free to supplement with your own thoughts.

I occasionally wonder if I embrace immersing myself into a new group of people too readily. My own experiences as a TCK – and bearing in mind I did a lot of my moving as a tween and teen, when you swam against the tide at your own risk – was “adaptation as survival”, with a side of defining myself as a bit odd and not too serious a person, since if I was already a bit odd, people had nowhere to go if they wanted to call me (their version of) “odd.”

As a grown-up, I have become aware that I still subscribe to these ideas in situations where I find myself the lone person, or one of few people, as a newbie in a group. Eg an office. But because I have an ingrained mental algorithm of how to engage with a new group, and automatically map the mannerisms of my new crew onto what I habitually do, it has occurred to me that people may not like me getting comfortable so fast, especially if they have kindly mentally geared up to welcome a new person into the group. (Or they simply are a person who needs warming up.) And for some younger colleagues, they may wonder why an older person isn’t particularly set in their ways.

I admit that I have gradually grown to feeling less like I want to change my ways. Perhaps because I already have used up so many of my ration of changes when I was younger? But I think I always will feel a duty to contribute to the wellbeing of any group I become part of, even if that involves more adaptation. What I am happy to have grown away from though, is apologising or disclaimering my own identity. I fully stand for who I am, warts and all.

You look like

When you fill in a form for a formal procedure, the most recent one to come to mind was registering for the new academic year at university, there is usually an optional page for your ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.* That is, things are usually kept for statistics (probably for marketing purposes), but should not impact your user experience. (There is no telling of whether or not they will.) If there is an option to click on a question mark or asterisk next to a question to further explain what the form-provider wants you to reply, the resulting window will tell you that ethnicity is how you identify yourself according to beliefs, ancestry, culture, traditions, and so on and so forth. Dictionaries will add that ethnicity is a hereditary factor.

I have been called a banana – yellow on the outside, white on the inside – and the perhaps more politely twanged yang2 wa2 wa (literally a straw doll kind of toy; in this case a play on words: wa2 wa, 娃娃, means doll or child, and yang, 洋, as an adjective, means Western). I have naturally inherited my outward appearance, which remains unaltered and distinctly Chinese**, but like all third culture kids, I have also amassed a social inheritance that means I skype my parents in January/February each year*** to bow and give my New Year’s greetings; I will lament that pancakes, no matter how dressed up, will never overtake the semla as best Shrove Tuesday confection; I will also complain when my tea has gone cold, and be on the fence about drinking it at all.

While I will dutifully tick the box for “Chinese” (or sometimes, “other – Chinese”, which makes me feel roughly “wow… okay… thanks”), I would very much like to know what form-providers would like to achieve with this information, other than have a heads-up on what I might look like****. Especially when I also have to fill in my name, nationality, and language skills anyway, which should give some clues (all on top of being unsure whether this sharing of information will play to my favour or not).

With that, I wish you a happy beginning to December. It’s not the “end of the year” yet – you have a whole month in which a lot of things can be accomplished. So get going.

 

Potential cans of worms to open:

*New addition to the registration form this year was “gender identity”, and the form does not let you register with any blank answers. Is this moving towards a new openness and awareness towards lgbt+ or inviting more trouble?

**Except I do not look distinctly Chinese after all. It is a very large country with many strands of DNA. Being Han Chinese, I have been asked in recent years whether or not I am Korean. I do not really know what to make of this so I remain happily indifferent.

***I talk to my family more often than just the once a year. Sometimes I even buy a ticket to visit them. Imagine that.

****According to a football-goer on a train a Saturday morning earlier this term, I found out that I apparently also look like a mail-order bride. I did not know that they had a look. That said, I will treat this as a reason to delve further into the world of young(ish)-men-in-groups (especially when going to large sporting events), as opposed to anything relating to my appearance.

Arguing with people on the internetz

Here’s a thing that turned up in my tumblr feed:

This is my would-be response:

Another point is that public engagement of STEM is very much a thing that is happening. Dissemination is important to the continuation of research, especially if you are state-funded, because you have to prove what your work can do for society. One way that this has been done with a decent amount of success (judging from feedback) is introducing scientists and their lives alongside the science, as this makes them and their work seem more relatable to non-scientists. Research and researchers already exist in something akin to a bubble without the need for any help to remove them further from the consumers of science.

If sexuality didn’t matter in the first place – i.e. there was no discrimination based on orientation to begin with – then we can question why people suddenly cared. The matter of fact is that sexuality and gender are both factors that affect a person’s standpoint and potential for advancement in science as well as academia (and LIFE). Even if we were to place such importance on “quantifiable repeatable cold hard science”, there are people behind the science who work very hard and deserve a bit of sympathy for their hardships. No scientists, no new science (explained for human consumption; if science was a sentient being, who knows if it would care about us puny humans).

There’s also the possibility that I’m responding to somebody who simply is an unsympathetic killjoy, but never mind.

(I feel I should also add that my response is purposefully placing science on the pedestal used by the tumblr-user ibringyoulove… what irony. Even those of us with all the privileges afforded us by social norms have down days in the lab. Let’s just all care a bit more about each other, okay?)

Anybody else wish to take up the thread?