Analysis of Interviews

4.1.1. “Travelling memory” and its incorporation in the “now” through routine and habitual practices

Roberts talks about embedded practices through narratives and how each time a relocation occurs remnants of the past local, national, and international memories overlap and establish in their new environments. As such, ETCI inhabit local and remote homes and communities through their narratively narrated, embodied, material, and imaginative home-making activities, where home is both a lived and an imagined space of belonging. Remembering takes on the form of an active process, an attachment motion that travels between different homes, and an ongoing negotiation of what home means in the present and past. ¹²¹ Memory as such is used to create a sense of continuity between old homes and new homes. Recollections, however, can also contribute to feelings of dislocation in local areas that never quite meet the respondents’ expectations of home. Taking part in routine activities and analysing how they made one feel linked to other houses and people was crucial in creating a sense of belonging.

Home had become multi-sited due to the ETCIs movement, yet they still craved solid, ingrained relationships. Their memories, as such, were performed, rehearsed, and recalled in local contexts as they moved to other places.¹²² Federica, who was born in Germany and has ties to Switzerland and France due to her background, but who grew up in Vienna while spending most of her holidays as a child with her grandparents in Switzerland, describes this recollection of memories for instance by trying to re-enact hiking and being in nature to keep her connection to Switzerland, a place she spent almost all her summers at her grandparents’ house:

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121 Roberts, ‘Everyday Practices of Home-Making,’ 87.

122 Roberts, ‘Everyday Practices of Home-Making,’ 105-106.

48

“We have the house in such a mini-village [in Switzerland] and all around are actually only mountains and my grandparents have always gone hiking, my mom too and they have taken us since we were little.

And we still do that today, and that's why for me mountains and nature and being outside in the garden [is when I think of home].”¹²³

She, therefore, looks for recognisable features of the Swiss landscape that she remembers from childhood and goes looking for them in the areas around Vienna. Federica, therefore, feels a sense of attachment to this area and a sense of connection by actively seeking out nature and going hiking, bringing back her childhood memories in a new setting. Creating a sense of home is used here in the context of routine and habitual behaviours. Through everyday activities like strolling or, in this example, seeking out nature, ETCIs’ "selves" are embedded in places, establishing spaces for the enunciation and manifestation of a self in space. Her childhood habitual memories, also in close relation to her family ties which is important to add here, are accumulated in the ‘body’ and are re-enacted in the present through recurrent actions.¹²⁴

This resembles the experience of another respondent, where he describes how he has learnt skiing and snowboarding in the Austrian alps, where he moved to from Italy due to his parents’ job offers, and where he keeps this habitual behaviour of winter sports in order to keep the connection and a sense of home with the Austrian countryside, where winter sports made up a core memory of his teenage years that he there. He finds comfort by trying to keep those memories alive, and in order to keep them alive he makes an effort to re-enact the hobby that he ties to his time in the Austrian Alps in the present as well.¹²⁵

Through these activities, which carry out an embodied claiming of space as a type of belonging, ETCIs may be able to gain a sense of understanding of their surroundings, and at the same time a knowledge of what home means and how a sense of home can be achieved. As such, the focus is on daily encounters and also routine activities, as for instance, domestic routines and everyday acts, as tidying up, sleeping, cooking, or eating, which adds to making an environment familiar, secure, and controlled.¹²⁶ Routine, especially in the conducted interviews, intertwines with creating a habit of practicing physical activity. This also becomes evident in the conversation with Alessandro, where he found a way of creating a sense of home and belonging by giving major relevance of establishing a routine that works for him in order

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123 Federica R6, Microsoft Teams, 16 May 2022.

124 Roberts, ‘Everyday Practices of Home-Making,’ 91.

125 Nikola R4, Microsoft Teams, 5 May 2022.

126 Roberts, ‘Everyday Practices of Home-Making,’ 91-92.

49 to feel grounded and safe. He does this by continuing a habit of exercising, specifically resistance training, as well as playing videogames, both essential hobbies he already started to engage with in the past while being a teenager and which both continued being essential for him while growing up at different locations that became a part of his mobility story. By continuing his passion for going regularly to the gym and continuing playing videogames, he embeds a practice from the past in the present, which ultimately helps him in feeling belongingness in his current place of residence, Vienna, as well. Alessandro, who spent most of his life in Germany and Austria, but has an Italian passport and Balkan roots due to his parents background, mentions how having a clear goal in mind professionally and education-wise also helps him to feel grounded, which ties into the argument of creating routine behaviours or practices in order to establish feelings of home. He describes that he has established a behaviour of performing as best as he can in his current internship while also working on his thesis before he finishes his undergraduate studies. Therefore, he pursues specific habits on a daily basis, that involve amongst others getting up at a certain time in the morning, going to work, doing his resistance training in the evenings and then incorporating cooking and contacting his nuclear family who lives far from him. The main driver for him to feel grounded and at home is to keep working hard to achieve his goals by being productive, to improve himself daily and to incorporate and establish activities that he loved to engage in already while growing up but that he can continue pursuing independent of any location.¹²⁷

Marie describes similar elements when she speaks of creating home and belonging in her current country of residence, Sweden. Considering the importance of home and how memory and bodily behaviours are intertwined, her narration makes this intertwinement of memory and every day embodied activities visible. She achieves this by walking and getting to know her surroundings, establishing certain landmarks as way of anchoring herself, based on characteristics that would remind her of a previous home she lived in in the US. As a result, home has several layers for her in her current place of residence, where she goes on walks in nature and gradually gets to know the streets and neighbouring area very well.¹²⁸ She also describes how food makes up an important part of creating a connection to her passport country Sweden, which again becomes an embedded practice from the past that she carries over to the present. The following extract from the interview describes this quite well, when she would describe how she will find comfort in eating typical Swedish meals to re-enact a memory from

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127 Alessandro R1, Microsoft Teams, 25 April 2022.

128 Marie R3, Microsoft Teams, 5 February 2022.

50 her childhood, as her mother would prepare mainly Swedish type of lunches for her and her siblings. Cooking Swedish meals, as such, is a practice that she can take with here wherever she moves and that establishes a relevant connection to one of her passport countries:

“I feel like cooking is something that has popped into existence again, because I grew up in the state of Virginia, which is technically a southern state, but I grew up in the northern part, so then [during my undergrad] I was eating like at the dining halls or whatever they serve. I mean, they had a range of different foods, but sometimes for breakfast, I just feel like I just really want a biscuit sandwich. And so, now it's like when I get stressed sometimes, I just make a batch of biscuits really quickly because they're super easy. But I feel like [Swedish] food is a comfort sense in that way.”

The same connection is observed in the interview with Nikola, where he describes that he will mainly cook Italian dishes, out of convenience, but also because it reminds him of his passport country and the country that he mainly grew up in before he relocated to Austria with his parents and siblings.

Christina, who has a Chinese background, but grew up in Austria and Germany for the most part of her life describes her establishing of routine by merging both German and Austrian celebrations, as well as Chinese festivities, for instance Chinese New Year, which is an important celebration in her family despite her being socialised mainly in Austria and Germany. In Christina’s portrayal of a certain conception of what it means to be Chinese, she takes part in traditional festivities and rituals from Chinese culture with her family which make her feel more connected to her Chinese culture and identity and helps her establish also a sense of security and comfort in her current place of residence.

All in all, the experiences of ETCIs in the interviews very much resemble the research by Roberts and constitute their experience of belonging to “multiple sites […] as ‘material and immaterial, lived and imagined, localized and (trans)national space[s]’ of belonging.”¹²⁹ ETCIs, therefore seem to also anchor themselves, through small stories of everyday emplaced practices, that connect them to small but impactful memories and the rituals and traditions that encompass them from previous stops and memories in their multicultural lives. Essentially, homemaking and life in a foreign country for ETCIs also means, same as in Roberts’ study, constantly living in a state of resistance and surrender, where the individual negotiates on a continuous basis which habits, memories and practices they can cling on to from previous

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129 Roberts, ‘Everyday Practices of Home-Making,’ 105.

51 places of residence, while at the same time negotiating which ones they can let go of.¹³⁰ The following extract from the interview with Nikola evidences this internal struggle on a personal level, where he describes how he inherited and continues practicing many Italian cultural habits, such as cooking Italian dishes, or his love for coffee. Nonetheless, as he is part-time working next to his studies, he also mentions how he internalised the Austrian work culture as opposed to the Italian or Serbian one. These differences in being used to a distinctive mode of interacting with colleagues, time-management or task division become especially apparent in conversations with his Italian friends. These differences, thus, make him question how adaptable he wants to be in his country of residence and moving forward in life. They also make him aware how leaving some of the habits he acquired in the past while being in Italy, but which he has now replaced with new ones from the present is causing internal struggles for him:

„I can really do that, being adjustable [to my environment], but I also ask myself how adjustable should I be? If I keep going, I know that I could adapt everywhere, but do I want to? Where does that leave my identity, so to speak? I think I've come to terms with that I don't have an identity to only one country, to a city, to a culture, but again, I also can't be everything at the same time. It’s a difficult subject.“¹³¹

Homemaking in this subchapter, therefore, can be comprised of many different activities and can have many layers. It can be a way of seeking out nature and the outdoors, establishing certain hobbies and routine behaviours, as well as cooking in a certain manner or related to a specific cultural context or celebrating specific festivities of the cultures that influenced them and which can be carried through time and are independent of any specific geographical location. Incorporating many different cultural activities, and sometimes having to shed some previous ones when it comes to homemaking can also result in internal feelings of confusion, and questioning their own individual belongingness, which the quote of Nikola above suggests.

4.1.2. ETCI Identity Construction

In terms of which anchoring strategies are used on an identity level, the following themes could be observed while conducting the analysis.

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130 Roberts, ‘Everyday Practices of Home-Making,’ 105-106.

131 Nikola R4, Microsoft Teams, 5 May 2022.

52 Language and embedded cultural knowledge in the language was a reoccurring and relevant theme as a crucial and defining marker of identity for all respondents. According to Crossman, language does not just have a functional element as a means of communication, but rather it makes up a crucial part of identity construction and is related to defining a sense of self. Different cultures and being able to speak different languages from an early age onwards, therefore, affects the way ETCIs interact with the world, and ultimately also how they define themselves. Crossman also argues that the languages that they do speak or do not speak are essential for the ETCI, as for instance shame or pride or closeness versus distance to a certain culture can be felt when discussing their language abilities. Being able to fluently communicate in the passport or host country’s language could evoke a sense of pride for the individual, whereas a lack of fluency in either the host country’s language or passport country’s language could create a sense of distance or even shame.¹³² The following quote by Ava, who has a Swiss, English and Swedish passport, but grew up mainly in Switzerland and England describes her connection to Sweden as follows:

“That's the country I've spent the least amount of time in, honestly. Even though it makes up the majority of my DNA, so it's like I'm mostly Swedish out of the three but I can't really speak a word in Swedish, like, I go there twice a year just to see my dad.”¹³³

As Pollock and van Reken describe in their book as well, TCIs typically acquire some level of cultural adaptation as a key survival skill for the frequent shifts in culture. The term cultural chameleon is used frequently to describe how, after some observation, they can quickly change their language, interpersonal style, outward look, and cultural customs in order to better fit into the scenario at hand. They feel shielded from the ridicule or rejection of others (and their own following sense of shame) that comes with being different from the monocultural group because their behaviour frequently becomes practically indistinguishable from lifelong members of that monocultural group.¹³⁴ Some TCIs who alternate between different behavioural patterns struggle to discern their own values from the diverse cultural mix they

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132 Tanya Crossman, ‘Chapter Five: The Inner Lives of TCKs’, in Misunderstood: The Impact of Growing Up Overseas in the 21st Century, 1st ed. (United Kingdom: Summertime Publishing, 2016), 264-266.

133 Ava R7, Microsoft Teams, 16 May 2022.

134 David C. Pollock, Ruth E. Van. Reken, and Michael V. Pollock, ‘Chapter 8: Personal Characteristics’, in Third Culture Kids Growing Up Among Worlds, 3rd ed. (Boston/London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing (Tolino Edition), 2017), 154.

53 have been exposed to. They may find it very challenging to determine whether there are, after all, some universal truths that apply to all cultures and that they can adhere to. The following extract from the interview with Nikola evidences this characteristic in how identity is constructed for him, as he grew up with three different cultural contexts, namely Serbia, Italy and Austria:

“I think you always have to adapt and that's just, you have to compromise [yourself] sometimes and the question is are you really yourself or are you just adapting because you need to do it to be accepted. It's a bit complex. I can easily make friends, I can easily adapt, but is it really good that I can do that so well, or maybe not? And that's why I think I'm pretty open because I can adapt and pick up stuff [from each of my cultures] and take what I need. But how good is it for me then actually to not quite having a stable identity and having to adapt all the time because people just want it that way?”¹³⁵

He describes his ability to shifting identities and taking cultural elements from each of the cultures that make up a part of his being, while also voicing his identity struggles as he feels like he has no stable identity because he keeps adapting due to others’ people expectations from the monocultural group. It becomes a resisting mechanism by the TCIs of not wanting to be put into a category by others, which they would not self-categorise themselves with. In the end, as Pollock and van Reken also mention, TCIs may take on so many cultural chameleon personas that they lose sight of their true self. Even when they make an effort to be themselves, they frequently end up doing nothing more than switching from being cultural chameleons in one group to the other, which is a theme that became evident in the interviews with the ETCI as well, as the above examples show.¹³⁶ The process of being a cultural chameleon, therefore, also presents unique difficulties. One reason, as argued by Pollock and van Reken is that TCK chameleons might never achieve real cultural balance anyplace, despite the fact that being able to "change colors" temporarily makes it easier for them to blend in with their peers on a daily basis. Even if they look to be part of the group, they may still be the cautious observer inside.

This may come across as an impression that they are leading a double life, feeling one thing on the inside while putting on another front, which can evoke feelings of hypocrisy in themselves, as mentioned in Nikola’s example.

Nonetheless, the pressure that comes from the monocultural context is very present in the interviews. There is this sense of being pigeonholed by non-TCIs, which means they are

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135 R4, interview.

136 Pollock, Reken, and Pollock, ‘Chapter 8: Personal Characteristics,’ 155.

54 characterised and assigned national labels, which do not necessarily fit them. For instance, Federica describes that she needs to justify her identity on some occasions and that her peers or other people from the monocultural context try to impose a different identity onto her:

“What I sometimes don't understand is when I explain that I'm from France, so that I am half French, half Swiss, that people try to impose on me that I'm Austrian because I grew up here and I feel a bit misunderstood because I have the feeling that certain people feel insulted when I say that I'm not Austrian. I like Vienna very much, but certain people feel somehow insulted when I say that I don't see myself as Austrian, although I like Vienna very much and yes, Vienna has its advantages and disadvantages, I am content here in Vienna, but I have the feeling that I sometimes have to justify myself [and how I identify].”¹³⁷

Another interviewee, Ava, describes how she switches between different identities to justify her lack of cultural references or knowledge and to avoid being misunderstood, resulting in context-dependent identity shifts, as well as serving as a defence mechanism if regarded as foreign to the monocultural group:

„Interesting point though is that I really made my Swiss identity a huge part of me when I first came to the UK. Because I had this accent, I made mistakes in English, my English was way worse than everyone else’s. There were so many cultural references I didn't get, so many TV shows I didn't grow up with. So, in order to kind of like defend myself because it was odd because it was like being a stranger, but having a perfect accent, you know. So, then I would be like, I am Swiss and when I was in Switzerland I was like, I'm English. As a defense mechanism, you know, to be like I'm not a weirdo who doesn't speak the language, like I am foreign.”¹³⁸

4.1.3. Sense of agency

Sense of agency of choosing where to build a home and how to define this, which goes in fact beyond the simplistic monocultural definition for the sample group was another crucial theme which emerged during analysis.

Ava, for instance describes this as follows:

„I've kind of adopted Italy as like my home in a way. I mean right now that's how I feel about it. I just feel this, like, immense freedom to kind of choose because I'm like, well, I've got no ties here, really. “¹³⁹

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137 R6, interview.

138 R7, interview.

139 R7, interview.