Life as a Third Culture Kid, Part 2

Q: What difficulties have moving and living in different places brought you? (e.g.- Having close friends, keeping in touch with old friends, lost sense of home, cultural barriers, language barriers, etc.)

It’s definitely been difficult keeping in touch with friends while moving. I’ve moved just about every year for the past 5 years, and it’s been hard to have just one super close best friend due to constant changes in geographical location. Not being able to spend a long time with one specific friend or group of friends in the last years of middle school and high school years used to be something that made me a little bit sad. I don’t really worry or think about this much though, and I am thankful of the unique situation I’ve been in that’s helped me appreciate people even more. I’ve met so many different types of people and I think that I’ve become very open-minded and understanding of them. It doesn’t matter so much your background as long as you can connect human-to-human. During my gap year and doing online school right now has also helped me learn to appreciate and be understanding of people of all ages, not just people my age. It’s really nice to just meet people outside of the house since I don’t go to a brick-and-mortar school even now.

I used to get emotional when the time came to move again. After 2 moves though, moving was just very casual for me. It’s hard to move on sometimes from memories in an old house, school, or neighborhood, but I’ve just been thankful to be able to experience different places, people, and cultures. Riding planes was a thrill for me in elementary school, and even in middle school until I started moving so much that I would get less excited about plane rides. I used to love airplane food, use the airplane TV, and take whatever goodies the airplane would offer, but now I just sleep on planes. I don’t even listen to music or watch movies. And I don’t really like airplane food.

I had quite a bit of experience language barriers with this during my middle school years in Korea, especially the first year. It was quite frustrating to not be able to express my thoughts or personality freely. I didn’t want to use English because I worried that I might embarrass myself by making my Korean even worse than it was, and I avoided using English in general because of three big reasons: 1) It makes me cringe to suddenly break the flow of a Korean sentence with English, and 2) Saying anything in English with perfect pronunciation (in an American accent especially for some reason) in the middle of Korean sounds cringey to me and might sound pretentious to others. I would usually avoid English altogether or say an English word in a Korean accent to not break the flow, which was difficult and unnatural to pronounce as well.

The muscles that you are used when speaking in English and Korean are different, so it took me a while to fully get used to speaking in Korean with fully relaxed muscles. In the beginning of middle school (when I was 12~13 years old), a lot of my classmates thought I was cute because I sounded young, was quiet, and nice. I’ve always been an introverted person so I guess the part about being quiet of was true, and I try to be nice to everyone so it didn’t feel strange to be called nice, but being “cute” became a bit problematic for me. My voice when I spoke in Korean versus when I spoke in English was very different. My Korean-speaking voice was a bit nasally, baby-ish, and my muscles were tense overall I’d say. There was nothing I could do about it because it was just that I wasn’t used to using my different muscles so much to speak in Korean. My English-speaking voice was pretty clear and “normal,” meaning not cute, girly, or deep. It was just in the middle. I would have to make physical efforts to fix my voice in Korean so that it would sound more relaxed and neutral.

Anyways, I could have just said what I needed to say in English or asked my friends more how to say things in Korean that I only knew in English, but I was too shy to do that when I was in middle school. Basically, for the first year of middle school, I was pretty quiet, couldn’t really express my sense of humor in Korean much, understand the Korean humor either, or pluck up much courage to just speak and get what was in my mind over with in English. My school had classes in English and Korean for each subject, so half of my class (no moving classes; kids in the same homeroom took all subjects together) that was in my English classes had a pretty good idea of what I was really like when I was expressing myself comfortably in English. The other half of the class that only heard me speak in Korean probably that I didn’t have much humor. Either way, it was hard to connect with other classmates easily because I couldn’t speak or act the way I really wanted to with them.

During the second year of middle school we got new classes, and I was overall much more expressive than I had been in the first year. My baby-ish (I hate this word now), tense-muscled voice was going away and I naturally just spoke out more. My vocabulary and skill in both speaking and writing had improved so much in just one year that I sounded more normal or like myself. There were still some moments when I found cultural differences (humor, mindset, expression of certain ideas, etc.) making it difficult for me to know exactly how I wanted to act. But the language barrier aspect had gotten much better. I was less nervous about making mistakes since I had actually reached a decent level of Korean, and there was actually a time when I felt a crisis with my English skills. It became a natural response to respond to everything in Korean, and I spoke in Korean almost all the time. I was genuinely worried about losing my English skills in speaking and writing, and forced myself to talk as much as I could in English with my mom, because once I became comfortable enough with Korean at school I started mixing Korean frequently when speaking in English at home. 

Q: Are there any memorable culture shocks that you can recall?

There are so many that I can recall from when I first moved to Korea. I’ll name a few. One is that friends will express affection for one another very physically. They will hit each other, which I found a bit scary at first but got used to, link arms, which I didn’t find that bad, or hold hands, which is something that I just have not gotten used to. Something else that shocked me was how friends tease each other by calling each other ugly. Most people know to take this as a joke, but it occurred to me that it would be rude and reasonably considered strange to call friends “ugly” in America.

I could also not understand the beauty standards here at first. A popular makeup trend here is: having a very white face, red/orange/pink lip tint, and straight eyebrows. Telling someone they have a small face here is a great compliment. Telling someone that their body is 8 times the length of their head is another great compliment about body proportions. My classmates in Korean school were very concerned with staying slim, even though they were already slim enough. There was something called the “Park Bom” leg exercise that my classmates told me they would do before they go to sleep every day to lose leg fat. The standards of what is chubby or fat in America are very different than in Korea. Another thing that I found strange when I first moved to Korea: it’s not uncommon (at least for junior high students, not so much for grown ups) to cover up your face or your friend’s face with a sticker in a photo and make it your profile picture. In other wards, you can just cover up anything you don’t like about the photo.

Q: Have you faced any obstacles or disturbances in your education path while moving?

I’ve gone through so many different schools and school systems in the process of moving. These include: US public school, Korean school, home school, and online school. In total since 2013 I’ve been in 5 schools as a regular student, and have taken a few courses through various online programs. It was quite difficult at first to transition to American high school after Korean middle school in terms of credit transfers and catching up with curriculum. In general, different schools have had different expectations and standards to meet, style of teaching, course load, schedules, school environment, and so on that has made it a challenge at times to keep up grades due to unstable foundations in certain subjects, transferring credits, and repeating subjects due to unfulfilled pre-requisites. I think you can get the picture. I think that OHS is really great for students that are constantly on the move. I can stay in the same school wherever I am in the world. I’ll talk about my nonlinear education path more in depth in future posts through. It’ll take hours to explain all of the craziness I’ve gone through.