• No results found

3. Methodology and Research Design

3.2. TCI literature examples – case selection of memoirs and personal essays

Before introducing the two examples of the literature in more detail, while looking for appropriate literature examples that fit the scope of this research, several important aspects became evident which I believe are noteworthy to mention to contextualise this project further.

As previously stated, in terms of who gets to share their experience about a mobile upbringing and narrate it, it also becomes evident in the entire body of TCI literature, autobiographies, and memoirs, where authors are primarily but not exclusively white and lack any other racial or ethnic origins. The purpose of this thesis is not to emphasize that the TCIs’

notion is the only and most prevalent kind of upbringing that results in uprooting and complex notions of home and belonging, even though, as discussed, this group is also inextricably linked to larger immigration patterns, racist immigration systems, and neo-colonialism. Instead, the aim is to increase visibility of the diversity of cross-cultural experiences that this migrant group has had throughout its upbringing and to demonstrate their richness of experiences and their home-making strategies. The findings of this thesis, ultimately, aim to contribute to a facilitation and better understanding of the effects of global migration and highly mobile upbringings in general. The pool of literature in form of memoirs, autobiographies, self-help books, and personal essays for and from TCIs is vast nowadays, reflecting all these mentioned aspects. However, some of the publications seem to also have been published for reasons beyond the TCIs’ uprooted upbringings. For instance, books were published based on the particularity of that individual’s background. Two examples to evidence this are, firstly, being the daughter of a covert CIA agent, living a fascinating and ambivalent life, or, secondly, being the daughter of a United Nations official, whose mother abandoned the author at age two and who became an orphan as a teen.102 There is also a wider array of self-help books for TCIs and for parents of TCIs, and other publications in a reflective kind of way, which include not only personal accounts, personal narratives and memoirs of TCIs, but also empirical studies and foundational works that have defined the general concept of TCK.103

The first selected book, Writing out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids, is a unique publication about growing up internationally as a

—————————————————————————————————————

102 Cf. Sara Mansfield Taber, Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, 1st ed. (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012), and Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021).

103 Cf. EuroTCK, ‘TCK Resources – July 2016’, TCK Resources, 29 May 2022, https://eurotck.net/resources/, and Rauwerda, ‘Third Culture Kids Who Write: A Growing List of Third Culture Authors’.

37 TCI for the following reasons: It is divided in four parts, by firstly dealing with the foundational concepts of TCK, providing a rich but concise overview of the most important scholars in academia. Secondly, reflections of TCIs and how they remember their experiences of growing up in-between different cultures are included, which consists of in-depth and highly personal first-hand accounts by the selected TCI authors. Thirdly, an exploration part is included where several articles and empirical research are accumulated that deal with TCIs in academic or corporate contexts and that explore TCI-ness from a theoretical point of view. Furthermore, they offer counsel for involved parties or a combination of all the aforementioned. The fourth and final part summarises in essays the reconfigurations of TCIs on the concrete realm of culture and how culture is used to maintain a sense of identity while being on the move.104 Therefore, it provides a comprehensive and abundant collection of TCI theories, literature and personal essays.

The second selected book, Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global, is a collection of twenty TCK memoirs who unpack deeply personal experiences of their childhoods on the move and how they experienced growing up globally. This includes on the one hand, first-time authors, and on the other hand, established authors, such as Isabelle Allende, Pico Iyer and Ariel Dorfman. Consequently, it makes for a collection which is a more inclusive representation of the experiences of TCIs from different professional backgrounds as well as geographical influences. Furthermore, it also gives the reader a more comprehensive and universal feel for the TCI experience of growing up in a nomadic way. Therefore, this book provides another relevant collection of storytelling for the upcoming analysis.

As for inclusion criteria, the stories that were selected needed to be about the personal upbringing and life of the TCI, meaning that for Writing out of Limbo example, for instance, only the stories from the second part, titled “Explorations”105 and fourth part, titled

“Reconfigurations”106 were considered, and for the Unrooted Childhoods example, all memoirs could be considered. However, to establish the European dimension of the thesis, only stories of TCIs who have one of their legal countries in Europe or have spent more than 6 months in Europe as part of their geographical locations while growing up were included. This narrowed the sample down further to three chapters or in this case three stories of each of the two literature examples. For the first book, personal essays by Kathleen Daniel, Anna Maria Moore

—————————————————————————————————————

104 Bell-Villada, Sichel, and Eidse, ‘Introduction,’ 1-16.

105 Bell-Villada, Sichel, and Eidse, ‘Explorations,’ 209-354.

106 Bell-Vilada, Sichel and Eidse, ‘Reconfigurations,‘ 355-474.

38 and Maureen A. Burns were included. For the second book, the memoirs by Pico Iyer, Sara Mansfield Taber and Camilla Trinchieri were included, all providing extensive and relevant accounts about their life on the move. The following short descriptions of the people’s backgrounds and content of the memoirs outline why their personal essays specifically were included:

Kathleen Daniel was born in Buenos Aires to Hungarian parents who fled Europe during World War II. Amongst others, she was raised in different U.S. states and cities, Venezuela, Spain and India and is now based in Budapest.107 In her story, she describes how she followed a variety of paths that took her from psychology to yoga, acupuncture and personal coaching to female leaders and back to her ancestral home in Hungary. She sees herself opening up to many cultures while chasing her own direction as an expansion of self, stretching the boundaries of her own identity by constantly transforming and reshaping who she is.108

Anna Maria Moore was born in Spain, is half-American, half-Swedish, and has moved across five continents in her first 18 years of life. She is a promoter in intercultural competence and awareness with her own company, named Culture&Moore.109 In her personal essay, she describes creating a sense of home through fragments of her past. She sees home as a plural concept, a transitory place and her account in the book provides pivotal data for this thesis.110

Maureen Burns grew up and has lived in the U.S., England, Scotland, Peru and Qatar and uses her experiences of a life on the move to inform her own work.111 She describes in her account the importance of maintaining any sort of documentation or symbolic resources, such as a ring or pictures, and how identity can be articulated via these forms of representation, as well as how attachment to small, portable objects is something that provides comfort with each move.112

Pico Iyer, the son of Indian immigrant parents, grew up between England and the U.S.

and has made a career out of his life on the move. In his memoir he describes how the life he

—————————————————————————————————————

107 Gene H. Bell-Villada, Nina. Sichel, and Faith. Eidse, ‘Contributors’, in Writing out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2011), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10652748, 478.

108 Bell-Villada, Sichel, and Eidse, ‘Introduction,’10.

109 Bell-Villada, Sichel, and Eidse, ‘Contributors,’ 483.

110 Bell-Villada, Sichel, and Eidse, ‘Introduction,’ 11.

111 Bell-Villada, Sichel, and Eidse, ‘Contributors,’ 477.

112 Bell-Villada, Sichel, and Eidse, ‘Introduction,’ 13.

39 has spent traveling enabled him to feel at home everywhere in the world, independently of place, family or cultural identity, whereby he also describes how he can choose identities as he pleases, with a worldview he regards as relative, rather than absolute. He sees himself as a member of intercontinental wanderers, whose home is found in airport transit lounges.113

Sara Mansfield Taber, a daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, spent her childhood between Europe, the U.S. and the Far East and she writes in her chapter about the struggles and how deeply she was affected by having to move around so much as a young girl.

She also mentions as how she balanced inner conflicts about loyalties to many different places that she became attached to during her upbringing. She recalls how she counteracts the loneliness of her uprooted childhood by immersing herself in new environments, by learning another language and through the help of her family ties.114

Camilla Trinchieri was born in the Czech Republic and by the time she is twelve, she has already lived in six different countries and describes in the memoir her experiences growing up with so many relocations. She recalls in her memoir how she collected memories of many childhood homes, keeping the connection to these alive by writing and by depersonalising and selecting specific memories, as well as denying and distancing from some. Her focus is on taking memories that are positive, such as the appreciation for a place, easiness with language, a cosmopolite way of thinking and being able to adapt to new surroundings.115