I was sitting in a new little secret restaurant last night, having dinner with a friend. The atmosphere in the place was serene and removed from the fast beat of the world outside. It was located down a long tunnel into the side of a building, and though the tables were in theory still outside, the air was warm and cave-like. While enjoying the silence of company with a close friend, I began to pay attention to the people sitting around us who, like us, had managed to somehow find this new secret restaurant and were too eyeing us wondering how we had managed to share in their discovery. That was when I noticed the couple sitting against the far wall in front of us. Unlike all the other patrons, they were not looking at anyone else. They were only looking at each other. And they were not part of this Spanish world. Three things marked them as aliens: 1) their language: they were definitely speaking Thai; 2) their dress: they looked like they had stepped out of an 80s bike thriller, possibly Mad Max, which is not uncommon to find in Spain, but somehow on them it looked even more profound; 3) they did not care at all about anyone else outside their bubble. It appeared that they could have been sitting and laughing and smoking cigarettes in any restaurant in any country in the world, as long as they had each other, they were at home
It was beautiful and made me extremely sad at the same time. As a third-culture child, growing up all over the world, I will never represent a certain culture so specifically as they represented Thailand. I looked at my friend and explained my thoughts to her. She looked at me and said, you shouldn’t be sad, we fit in anywhere. She too had been born in Russia, and then she had moved to three different countries before choosing to stay in Barcelona. Just like me. She spoke Spanish, Russian, and English, and when we spoke we mixed all three languages into one so that no native speaker of any of the three would ever understand.
The idea of having a third culture is not anything new. Anthropologist Ruth Hill Useem coined it in the 50’s, but despite this, not few people know what it means and exactly how many third-culture kids there are out there. But it appears that we seem to gravitate towards one another and form our own communities. And in my dreams, I wonder if there will one day be a future where everyone will be a Third-Culture Kid, where borders do not exist, and where we can chose not only how we dress, but where we are from. At least for now, we have each other.
The Little Observer 