I am not halfway between China and America
When do I stop being halfway between China and America? When will people stop looking at me as if I am some sort of fixed thing, sitting contentedly halfway between the two halves of my life, passively observing the world around me from a supposed point of balance between two worlds? This question seems to come up a lot. It assumes a certain logic: that there are two poles, two clear halves, and something that sits right in the middle of them all. But without clear definitions of each side of this metaphor, the idea of being “halfway” is confusing. For starters, what does it mean to be halfway between two cultures? How can I be halfway “between China and America” when Chinese and American cultures aren’t fixed points on a clearly defined map?
Of course, the idea of a third culture kid isn’t new (at least in spirit, if not in name). If I wanted to trace the term back to when it was first coined, I’d start with Ruth Hill Useem. But when I talk about third-culture kids in the real world, I tend to be influenced by Third Culture Kids, the book published by David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken in the late 1990s. Their account of third-culture kids is more nuanced: it describes a relationship with multiple cultures that does not involve “full ownership” of any one of them. This differs from the popular, flattened image of a third-culture kid as someone pulled in two directions between two worlds.
The implicit logic of “halfway” stems from a very naïve, romanticized, and reductive view of identity. It puts identity at the midpoint between two fixed, homogeneous origins. But when we look at specific examples (especially when we start to look closely at identity in practice), the logic of being “halfway” begins to break down. Take code-switching, which is sometimes reduced to a cliché of mechanical translation: Chinese here, English there. In practice, the specific words, tones, and language practices we use, together with the social contexts in which we use them, constantly reshape the meanings of both languages and cultures. The image that we are somehow torn in two opposing directions between the two worldviews that define us doesn’t feel at all familiar. Chinese and American cultures are moving targets rather than points on a map that can be pinpointed and measured. Cultures don’t develop independently. And even if they did, when we consider differences across generations and across borders (differences reflected in music, fashion, food, technology, religion, political language), it quickly becomes clear that there is no way to locate a fixed midpoint between two constantly moving endpoints.
Then there’s intersectionality: nationality is not sufficient; race, gender, generation, class, language, region, and the communities I have lived in over the course of my life all shape my identity. I am Chinese and I live in America, sure, but those are only two aspects of who I am. The idea of being halfway works only if every other dimension of identity is held constant. As soon as we start to account for them, halfway becomes incoherent. I do not stop being halfway because I was never halfway to begin with.