Third Culture Kid (TCK, 3CK): A term used to refer to children who were raised in a culture outside of their parents’ culture for a significant part of their development years.
Dear Grandma,
There is no better cure to any illness than your home-cooked Korean food. For 18 years of my life, you have soothed my unhappy stomach with red-bean boiled rice and unblocked my stuffy nose with spicy bean sprouts soup. I was constantly sick as a child, usually from the traveling I did with my flight attendant parents, walking into your house from my early flight at 7AM with a burning fever from vacationing in a snowy climate or with a strange stomach bug from the tropics. Every time, the smell of your stew on the stove drifting through the house was enough to lull me to sleep until you woke me up to eat some magical elixir for health.
Nothing has changed since I left for college. I walked back into your house this break with a suitcase with a terrible sore throat that I had had for weeks, and two days of your cooking was all I needed to make me throat feel less like sandpaper and more like a pharynx. When things like that happen, I reconfirm my belief that no Western medicine could fix me up like you can. But I also realize that I will never be able to cook like you, know your recipes and ingredients, because I haven’t lived in the same country as you for more than half of my life. Not only did I not have time to learn from you, but I have learned to cook way more Thai food than I have Korean food, having grown up in Thailand. I could tell you exactly what herbs to use for what dish here, but I couldn’t name five herbs you use in Korea. That is the distance I feel from you, no matter how many conversations, jokes, and memories we share. We are so close yet two worlds away.
Grandma. Do you know what it is to live in the grey area between two cultures? I feel like I’ve become the one-way glass we see in detective movies. I can see both sides of my life but my two worlds can’t see each other. When I find a good Korean song, I wish my friends could appreciate the lyrics, and when I write a poem in English, I wish you could feel my words. Even when all of us are banging on the one-way glass in an attempt to see through to the other culture that exists inside of me, to know me through and through, the glass seems ever more bulletproof.
What do we do about this seemingly unbridgeable gap? This formidable distance that keeps me from feeling like I really know you, and that you really know me, your strange, westernized, slightly radical and unpredictable granddaughter? Keep telling me stories. Talk to me for days about the Korean War, about losing your family to the soldiers, tell me about the day you met Grandpa and the way his hands trembled when they first touched yours; I’ll tell you stories about my respect for the Thai king, the language barrier with mom and dad, and the shenanigans I get up to in a university where everyone has an opinion about something. I think stories will save us. They’ll keep us from growing too far apart.
Update: I translated this letter into Korean for my grandmother's 72nd birthday. She noted the irony of having to translate a letter about cultural distance that is partially formed by a language barrier. She is a poet herself, and she loved it. :)