Third Culture Kid (n.): A child who grows up in a culture different from the one in which his or her parents grew up. (Merriam-Webster)
When people ask about my heritage, they invariably get confused. A half-Japanese, half-Chinese-Indonesian girl who’s only ever called London home but who also has a US passport. Who speaks three languages (to varying degrees of fluency), including French and Japanese, but not Chinese or Indonesian. Whose father grew up between Hong Kong, Indonesia and Hawaii, but only speaks English. And whose parents lived in Toronto and Paris before settling in the UK.
Despite the richness of my heritage, it is punctuated by voids, filling the space where there used to be a language; a culture; a way of life. If I go looking for these things, will I find anything at all?
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On a recent trip to Beijing, I remember having to explain to almost every person I met that, despite my appearance and surname (Wong is a very common surname in Hong Kong), I did not speak Mandarin nor Cantonese (my GCSE-level Mandarin a distant memory). My white British friends, expecting me initially to act as translator for them, were bemused by this; every other person with Chinese heritage on the trip spoke the language fluently. (Despite this, however, most of my closest friends at Oxford are Chinese speakers; is this an example of the widely-observed yet subconscious social gravitation towards those who look similar to oneself?)
At home, my father would often play songs and watch films featuring classic Cantonese artists—Andy Lau, Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung—seeking to evoke some past that perhaps couldn’t be reclaimed. As a child, my Japanese grandparents would sigh as they tried to correct my way of holding chopsticks for the umpteenth time, abandoning their mission when I showed no signs of improvement. My cousins in Indonesia, following decades of government-sponsored repression of Chinese language and culture, cannot communicate with their elders in Chinese; my father and I try to communicate with them in English, but misunderstandings often arise. To this day, my mother is not sure whether giving up the Japanese citizenship I held at birth (and with it, my place on the koseki, or official register, of my family) was the right decision.
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The last time I was explicitly asked how I would define my identity was in a US college interview. I remember being surprised by the question. Growing up in London, I was fortunate to not have to question my place in the city landscape regularly, if at all. ‘It’s normal to be an immigrant here,’ my father would often reassure me.
Of course, there were some moments that forced me to consider the uniqueness of and contradictions inherent in my dual Chinese and Japanese heritage. While vaguely aware from a young age of the crimes that the Japanese military had committed against Chinese civilians during World War II, for the most part, I was shielded from the debates surrounding this subject. But one day in primary school, my Chinese best friend said that her grandparents had told her to stop speaking to me, because I was Japanese. I remember my shock and confusion at the time, just about managing to reply ‘but I’m also Chinese.’
And outside of London’s multicultural milieu, this feeling of otherness deepened. On a road trip across the US West Coast several years ago, my parents and I stopped at a remote, rural town in Oregon: my first time visiting a quintessential American diner. As I began to tuck into my bright yellow grilled cheese sandwich, an elderly man sitting nearby ambled slowly over to our table. Looking my father straight in the eye, he shook his hand, wordlessly, before returning to his table. It must have been the first time he had met people who looked like us.
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Growing up, I was lucky to be able to go to Japan every one or two years, normally during the summer, to visit my grandparents in the city of Takarazuka—famous for its Grand Theater. As a young child, I incessantly begged to stay when the day came to fly back to the UK, bursting into tears at the mere thought of leaving my friends and family there behind (and, let’s be honest, the infinite array of stationery stores, 100-yen shops and supermarket dessert aisles). As the years passed, my relationship to Japan mellowed, but I still thought of myself, perhaps tinged with the naïveté of adolescence, as more Japanese than anything else. That is, until relatively recently.
By the time I returned to Takarazuka last year, something in the air had changed. At first, I brushed away the thoughts that came into my mind—surely, I was just imagining things, having spent much less time in the country since Covid? Over time, however, I grew more and more convinced of one thing: I did not belong there.
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It takes only a few months of reduced practice to lose significant fluency in a language. Given the intensity of term time, I barely registered the fact that I was no longer speaking Japanese on a regular basis after starting university. The time difference with the Japanese speakers in my family didn’t help; in Trinity of my first year, my mother moved back to Japan to be closer to her family. I went from speaking Japanese on a daily basis to only using the language once every few weeks, at most.
In the past, my young age, relative fluency in Japanese and near-native accent had shielded me from the scrutiny that now accompanied me like a hawk. From my mother, telling me that ‘as a woman, you can’t wear shorts in public here, even in the summer;’ from the Lawson convenience store clerk, who stared, wordlessly, as I fumbled with an Amazon return parcel, the kanji characters in the overly complicated instructions swimming before my eyes; from the researcher, who, with a hint of self-satisfaction, asked whether I was glad to have come on a Japanese-language tour of a national lab, given that I probably understood less than half of what the tour guide had said.
Or perhaps it was the idealism of my younger self that stopped me from questioning my belonging in Japan, a country notorious for its ethnic and social homogeneity. Now, even everyday interactions had become awkward, as words I used to know slipped my mind. ‘How many seconds will it take for them to realise that I’m not one of them?’ I asked myself each time.
I began to turn away.: I stopped speaking Japanese altogether in some situations. While this is not something of which I am proud, for the first time, I realised that not speaking a language wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: by claiming to not speak Japanese I would escape being judged by the more conservative standards of Japanese society. Using my so-called ‘gaijin (foreigner) card’ allowed me the freedom to be ignorant of the exacting behaviour expected of those raised in Japanese culture, an option which my Japanese-born friends didn’t have the privilege of choosing.
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With the same thoughts in the back of my mind, I returned to Japan this summer, this time for a research internship in the city of Tsukuba. Unusually for Japan, over a third of the researchers at the national research institute at which I worked came from overseas.
When I ate lunch at the institute’s airy, high-ceilinged canteen, I could hear a multitude of languages being spoken; for once, the canteen staff didn’t seem bemused by my British-accented Japanese. In addition, everyone in my research group, including my supervisor, was from mainland China, with varying levels of fluency in both English and Japanese. While my supervisor was, again, surprised that I didn’t speak Chinese, we were able to communicate more or less without misunderstandings in English. Slowly, I began to feel less out of place.
Most days, I would go to the canteen with one of the PhD students in my research group: a lively young woman who had come to Japan one year earlier from Shanghai. Having studied and conducted research in Chinese all her life, we struggled somewhat to communicate in English, despite my best efforts to rephrase questions and find creative ways to explain vocabulary (Google Translate being a last resort). Was the universe telling me that I should learn Chinese?
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On the last day of my internship, after the final research presentations had been concluded, I went over to her. ‘I’m sorry about all the communication difficulties during our conversations,’ I said. ‘I’ll try to start learning Chinese. If I come back next summer, hopefully we can have easier conversations.’
She brightened, but then replied, ‘that would be nice, but it’s ok if we communicate in English.’
Perhaps, after all, we didn’t need to perfectly understand each others’ languages in order to form such connections; perhaps, finding common ground in our shared interests, values and experiences was more than enough to bridge these gaps many times over.