Posts Tagged ‘ Third-culture kids ’

“Do you people have nicknames for everything?” a friend once asked. It seemed that way. My dad was linguistically very inventive, and his peculiar usages entered the family vocabulary. If he asked whether you’d like a mucket, he was offering you a beer. But, just in case you think his lingo was logical, a mucket was also a hat. “Pop those potatoes in the rototiller” meant stick them in the microwave oven. “Let’s hear a tune on the …Read More

At age ten, if you’d asked me what were the essential ingredients of the diplomatic life, I would have said, “clothes.” My family arrived in India a few months before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, an event that touched off celebrations in Commonwealth countries across the globe. India, then six years independent, was no exception. My mother found she needed at least half a dozen extra ball gowns for the parties in then sleepy Madras (now bustling Chennai.) …Read More

Growing up in India in the 1950s, we didn’t have TV, and only occasionally went to the movies. My sisters and I staged our own entertainment, including plays we wrote ourselves. One was called “The Abduction of Brenda Brussels;” it must have been pretty scary. Then there was our version of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” complete with headless horseman. We held it in the neighbors’ driveway, so that we could use their pony in the production. …Read More

Growing up overseas, my sisters and I may have had a sketchy idea of what big ambassadors did, but we were pretty well drilled in the role of “little ambassadors,” to use my mother’s phrase. She had got it into her head that the world regarded American children as brats, and she wanted to reverse that opinion. So. No chewing gum in public. No running in airports. No screaming at the swimming pool. Shake hands with the grown-ups …Read More