‘I Celebrate the Tapestry of Places that have Made Me Who I Am’: The Highs and Lows of Being a Third Culture Kid

By Chhaya Nayyar 

Identity is so complex, and memory equally so. For me, the warm familiarity that is conjured with the smell of moong daal boiling goes hand in hand with a sharp stab of shame and guilt. The ghost of my eleven-year-old self is summoned, throwing away what she’d brought from home at lunchtime, growing to resent everything from the smell of her food to the colour of her skin.

I’ve lived in many places. In Bombay, at the tender age of six, my world was simple. My house, my school, the park where I met my friends and the blockbuster down the street were what it consisted of. Both my daal chaaval at the lunch table and the sound of my thick Indian accent blended into the homogeneity of my peers. Back then, America was an intangible concept, a world that existed only on Disney Channel. The feeling of belonging was effortless.

When my family moved to China, it felt like a cataclysmic shift; it was the farthest thing from home imaginable to me. The biggest shock was that I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I had dark skin, but only because those around me made an effort to make me aware, recommending me the best skin bleaching creams. I was eight years old. My skin wasn’t the only problem: my voice was suddenly too loud and my accent dubbed difficult to understand.

Though China was an adjustment, with time, I decided that maybe things were not so bad there after all. I loved dan dan noodles, Chinese green beans and Din Tai Fung. My world expanded to include JUSCO, the mall where my mother would buy knock-off designer bags, the Guang Zhou Seaworld (where I bought two pet turtles), my new school and my new house. A place that had felt so foreign now felt familiar.

As China became my home, India became less tangible to me. My Mandarin got better as my Hindi got worse, the blockbuster down the street from my old house closed without me knowing, and the people who had been my friends in Bombay became my old friends.

By the age of eleven, we had moved again. The feeling of belonging quickly became a scarcity in my life. If China had felt far, America felt impossible – was impossible. Finding my name too difficult to pronounce, my fifth-grade teacher settled on calling me China (a nickname that she found twice as funny when she learned that’s where I had moved from). Kids peered over at my packed lunches with questioning looks at best and poorly disguised gagging noises at worst. Did I eat dogs in China? Were my parents terrorists? China seemed like a breeze in comparison to the adjustment I had to make in the States.

To survive I learned to shapeshift, to bend and break little pieces of myself until I became something just right. My American accent became my armour. With the help of Hannah Montana and my new American friends, I learned to fake the perfect midwestern drawl. I ate bland grilled cheese and an apple at lunch while the meal my mother packed me sat untouched at the bottom of my backpack.

These weren’t the only ways I attempted to fit in. I begged my parents to let me wear jean shorts and shop at Justice. My friends introduced me to Kool-Aid and took me to Skyline Chilli. I learned words like NRI (non-resident Indian) and TCK (third culture kid) and started haphazardly using them to describe my identity and lived experience. Both felt to me like yielding to the idea that I would be forever alienated from the place I once called home.

By the time we moved to Singapore, I realised that I had spent my childhood learning how to mould myself into the most acceptable, most unassuming version of myself. Underneath the people-pleasing and the desire to fit in, I had no idea who I was. So much of my Indian identity had been buried away under shame and resentment, and I looked at any American tendency I had with contempt. Meanwhile, every influence from China felt like something that I didn’t have the right to claim.

Somehow, slowly, among the rubble of my constructed identity, I found things that were true. I still loved playing holi, snacking on papdi chaat and drinking nimbu pani. I loved celebrating Chinese New Year, eating da miao and drinking jasmine tea. I even began begrudgingly admitting my occasional cravings for Skyline Chilli and a root beer float. I learned to let all the things that made me who I am coexist, no matter whether they fit or made sense together.

There are still days I crave a coherent sense of belonging and that I mourn the feeling of not having one place to call home. But most days, I celebrate the tapestry of people and places that have made me who I am. My world will always include Nizam’s Kathi Kabab in India, Chuan Guo Yan Yi in China, Dewey’s Pizza in Cincinnati, and Pepper Lunch in Singapore, but it can easily expand to include Mughli Curry House, Plattfields Park, and the Foundation in Manchester – as well as any more additions to come.

I’ve embraced the complexity and the confusion of my identity. Accepting the knowledge of who I am today feels amazing, as is not being scared of who I may be tomorrow.