The Japanese tale of Urashima Taro: On Home, Repatriation, Third Culture Kids, Asian Americans, and My Father

Sometimes I feel the best friends I ever had were imaginary. There are very few people to relate to, and the friends I had were in the stories I could escape to. The life of a vagabond, a Third Culture Kid, and a young man trapped lost between cultures in some metaphysical space run parallel to the most common telling of the Japanese tale of Urashima Taro.

Ten years later: a new passport, a new identity, a new path

I just got my new passport in the mail last week because little did I realize before heading off to Indonesia this summer, I was already approaching the time to renew it which is December of this year. However, most places won’t even let me in if the passport expires in six months, so I went out to take care of it as early as possible.

My love/hate for social media as a Third Culture Kid

When I first went to college in 2002, I had a very hard time fitting in because of my background and inability to answer the notorious “where are you from?” question consistently and confidently. Ironically, it was in a city where its residents claimed to be some of the most open-minded and diverse people lived: San Francisco. I always wished that there was some way to know who knew what it was like to come from an international school or hate answering the aforementioned (read: dreaded) question wherever I was at in order to have some potential friends to relate to, and nowadays, there is that resource and it’s found in social media. Looking back and looking at how it’s shaped a new generation of TCKs, I almost wish that resource never came.

Voices in my head: accents, manners of speech, personality shifts from the TCK experience

Last month, I started a thread on the Facebook Third Culture Kids group which read as follows: “Anyone ever find their accents and manner of speech change very noticeably depending on whom they’re talking to or what their mood is in one language? When I’m mad and arguing, I sound like I’m a Massachusetts kid, when I’m saying “yo’ mama” insults, I apparently sound Texan, when I’m upset and closing off, I sound somewhere between a generic North American with a British influence. It’s almost as if these accents and speech patterns are different people or personalities altogether. Or when I’m speaking Chinese, Japanese, or Tagalog, I find myself gravitating toward a different personality with certain conversation topics being more prevalent speaking in one language over the other (and it’s not due to limited and various vocabulary proficiency).”

A Daoist observation on fitness and wellness

I’ve been reflecting on the cycle of life in my meditations and workouts.

Learning to smile

Two years since my father died, I’ve finally found happiness and peace.

Third Culture Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

Recently, I got into a disagreement with a friend in my program over one of my life experiences, what he dismissed as “too fantastical to be real”. My immediate response after putting up with this kind of reaction was to cut him down and tell him that his lack of life experience and his limited life experiences clearly indicate he isn’t as open-minded or as worldly as he believes himself to be, in spite of his own travel experiences and being in a program that is focused on international relations. It was only after I realized that getting this defensive about someone’s inability to believe was that this relates to both the life experience and the Third Culture Kid experience.