From “Third World” to Third Culture

We were having sushi the other day. There’s a restaurant close to our home in the Netherlands with a small play area for kids. Usually in the Netherlands, we don’t meet kids who speak English, so when I overheard mine talking to other kids in English, I assumed, maybe other expats?

Then a little girl asked my daughter where she was from. I’m sure she was as confused as we were, because how did these kids speak English? My daughter swiftly answered: “I am from the Netherlands.” Her older brother immediately corrected her: “No, we are from America.”

The little girl looked even more confused. “No, I am from America,” she said. “Maybe you’re from India?”

Both my kids, in unison: “No! We are not from India.”

At least there was consensus on that. Their parents, though — we ARE from India.

The kids shrugged it off and went back to playing. We brushed it off too, mostly because they clearly weren’t bothered. But the moment kept sitting with me. Because no matter how my kids talk, what accent they pick up, where they were born; the way they look will always be the first impression people form.

It’s not a racist thing, not really even an “issue.” I get it. You stand out more when you look different from the majority around you. I can’t change their skin color. I can’t make them more confused than the world already will. And I can’t make them more “Indian” either. Not that I’d want to, and not that it would even fix anything. It would just be trading one box for another.

Third Culture

I’d heard of a book called Raising Third Culture Kids, and my kids fit the definition well. I don’t fully belong to India, America, or the Netherlands anymore. I’m not fully any of them, and I probably never will be. So I can’t expect my kids to be, either.

If I’m honest, we didn’t even really try to make them “more Indian.” We attempted our language early on, but one of my kids needed extra support with language development at the time, so we let it go. They understand it now, but don’t speak it, and that ship has probably sailed. We also don’t practice many Indian customs at home. Part of that was circumstance; as broke grad students in the U.S., there wasn’t much room for it. But part of it is deliberate: a lot of those customs are tied to religion, and we’ve chosen not to raise our kids into that. So no, we didn’t try to balance the scales. We just let them be whatever they turned out to be.

But it made me think about something bigger: how much of what we call “belonging” is really just the size of the box we grew up in.

Mumbai

When I lived in Mumbai, everyone around me was Indian; Mumbai, even. I was a typical snobbish city girl who thought anything outside Mumbai was a “village.” I carried that around until I left for college outside the city and met people from all over India. Different accents, different upbringings, whole cities I hadn’t given a second thought to. Did it cure the arrogance? Not really. I still quietly thought I was somehow cooler than everyone else.

America

Grad school in the U.S. broke that box open a bit more. I met people from everywhere, and it hit me how different my upbringing was from all of theirs. I still assumed I’d fit in easily. Big city girl, should be simple. And it was easy, because in the U.S., almost no one is “from” just one place. Everyone’s an immigrant of sorts. By the end of year one we were all doing the same Black Fridays, the same Christmases.

But what actually surprised me was the curiosity. My friends wanted to know about my upbringing, my food, my culture. They wanted to celebrate Diwali with me, eat Indian food, try on Indian clothes. One friend asked my mom to teach her how to make a basic Indian gravy from scratch. Another dragged me to the Indian grocery store just so she could cook Indian dishes herself. It wasn’t polite interest or fake “niceness”. It was genuine effort. And it left no room for the snobbishness I’d been carrying around. It’s hard to feel superior to people who are actively trying to understand where you come from.

The Netherlands

Then I moved to the Netherlands, and oh boy.

Integrating here is hard in a way I hadn’t experienced before, and not because people are unkind. It’s more that nobody seems to feel the need to ask. There’s no one dragging me to an Indian grocery store or asking how to make a basic gravy. People are content with their own lives, their own circles, and that contentment doesn’t leave much room for curiosity about mine. I don’t live in Amsterdam, but a short 30-minute train ride, by American standards basically next door. And the more Amsterdammers I meet, the more I recognize myself in them. The version of me from my Mumbai college days.

I’ve had people tell me, with a straight face, that Leiden is too “south.” That people down there talk differently. It’s a 30-minute train ride. It cannot be that different. And this to someone who doesn’t even speak the language yet; as if that context helps.

Or the fries. It is not friet, it’s patat. Meanwhile every fries shop in the country proudly labels itself a frietwinkel. Who am I to say anything, but I notice.

Their world starts and ends within Amsterdam. Everything past it is too far, too rural, too weird. We “big city, one story” people really do make it our whole personality. It makes me mad, because I love this city and it makes me mad because I recognize that hating, narrow version of myself in it.

Being born in a city or growing up in one shouldn’t make anyone more “cool.” The world is enormous and the differences in it like food, language, upbringing, education are the interesting part, not the inconvenient part. I’m glad I no longer box myself into one place and call it my whole identity. America didn’t just teach me how to belong somewhere; it taught me to open my mind to people who aren’t like me. I hope I can pass that on to my kids.

Back to the Sushi Place

My kids don’t need to belong to one place. They just need to belong to themselves, and stay open to whatever comes next.

I think about that little girl at the restaurant sometimes, how sure she was that my kids had to be from somewhere, in a way that made sense to her. And how sure my own kids were that they weren’t from India, full stop, no hesitation. And honestly, I think they’re right (for now), they weren’t born there, haven’t grown up there, and most of their cousins, friends, and memories belong to the U.S. and the Netherlands. India is where their parents are from, not where they’re from.

But I don’t think that’s the end of it. Maybe as they get older, with more visits, more of our food, more of our stories, they’ll start claiming a piece of it for themselves, the way I eventually claimed pieces of places that weren’t originally mine either. Their certainty right now is real. I just don’t think it’s necessarily permanent, and I don’t think it needs to be.

If I’m being fully honest, I haven’t made peace with any of this the way this essay might make it sound. Some days I wish I had one easy answer to give, “India,” clean and simple, end of conversation. It would be the easiest thing to say, and it would be the truest thing, technically. But it wouldn’t be honest to how I actually live. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer “where are you from” without a small pause, a small tiredness. Maybe every immigrant carries some version of that pause. It doesn’t go away. We haven’t resolved it and we haven’t fixed it. We’ve just accepted this messier, harder-to-explain version of belonging is simply what it is now, and most days, that’s enough.

Coming from a “third world” country to raising “third culture” kids is a real step up, and I’ll never take that for granted. We come from a place but can belong to many. I’m still working that one out.