Zippers and circuses

Today we get on a plane and go home. Home. That word sure changes meaning with this lifestyle. This way of living is sometimes called a third culture, because, as someone said, we’re really only at home flying between places. I wouldn’t go that far. At least get me off the airplane. But while most cultures are tied to a geographical area, this “third culture” is tied to movement, to integration, to incarnation. It means moving between homes, riding on the differences and drawing them together like the closing of  a zipper.  Our kids used to be called mk’s, missionary kids, but they have so much in common with the kids of diplomats, military personnel,  and others who  live cross-culturally, that now they are joined together as tck’s, third culture kids. I am a tck. My kids are tck’s.

I once read a book that has the best metaphor for tck’s I’ve ever found. The book is by John Irving, a Canadian who navigates between Canada and American audiences. I’m not recommending the book (check him out before you tackle him), but there is one scene that has stayed with me ever since I read it years ago. One of the characters is an Indian (from India) doctor who had immigrated to Canada years before the story begins. Haunted by the needs in India and all he has left behind, he returns to India, time and time again, realizing he can’t let go. Throughout the story, he is constantly wrestling with his identity as an Indian living in Canada. During his visits back, he researches dwarfism in India and, in order to collect his data, follows Indian circuses as they move around the country because they provide jobs for entire dwarf communities.

At the very end of the book, the doctor is standing at a bus stop, and there is a young mother and her son waiting for the same bus. It’s winter. Night. Snow is falling. The streetlight shines down on the three humans bundled against the cold. (If I were discussing this book in a class, which I won’t, I would call attention to the things in the scene that show its truthfulness: the light, the baptism in snow, the child’s innocence, the transitional nature of the place.) The little boy turns and looks at the man beside him, dark skinned, exotic-looking, and he asks in wonder, “Who are you?” The doctor realizes this is his chance. He has one opportunity to answer that question truly, honestly, transparently, the one question he’s been wrestling with for years. He knows that he needs to answer quickly before the mother gets uneasy and moves her son away. Or the bus comes and shatters the magic. He leans down, looks in the boy’s eyes and tells him the truth: “I’m a son of the circus.”

Tck’s are kids of the circus, carrying their culture invisibly inside them as they get moved around. They are children of Oz, zipper childen, children of airports, trails, and movement. Their culture is the one that falls through the crack and gets lost to view because it’s not tied to one place but to the seams between places. They connect things. Their own lives and worldviews are the thread.

Tck’s are not that by choice. The last time I was in a Mixtec town, we met an eight year old American boy, the son of one of our Mixtec friends, who had just come back to Mexico with his family. He did not speak Spanish. He’d never been out of the US, and here he was in a Mixtec village, learning how to live. How many migrants in the world give birth to tck’s? I read that when migrants arrived from all over Asia en mass to work in Hawaii, the children created a new language in one generation. There’s genesis there.

Jesus was a tck, carrying his own bi-culture with him wherever he went, pulling people together that were strangers before, blessing the good and redeeming the bad, and saying things like, “As you are going to all the nations…” As you are going. We all carry this human-divine culture with us now that sews people together that were strangers before.  We are all tck’s, even those of us who never move. “We are foreigners, nomads here on the earth, looking forward to a country we can call our own.” God’s makes us all, like his own Son, his third culture kids.