Haunted Mirror

So I really did want to do this meme which is  you comment on a friend's blog, and they pick 7 of your interests to hear you out on. If you've already done this, then I'll pick a few for you to comment here on. rowana tagged me for:

anne shirley, anthropology, beowulf, frances hodgson burnett, global nomad, prince charming and urban legends

Let's go backwards, just to give me a bit of motivation. (I really have a sad lack of random interests, which I realized when "strawberry pocky" came up in someone else's list. Strawberry pocky! The men's kind were the best, but POCKY!? It's the kind of random Japanese cultural thing that just hits me like a beam of joy.)

Phew. I could cut myself short to save my voice. (I set out to say "to save my big toes" but realised at the scene my mind concocted immediately that was a bit too much of an exaggeration.)

As for Lymond? I think I'm hooked now. Just finished Queen's Play and enjoyed it much more (except for the...Oonagh thing. Oh Lymond. You've broken my heart as well as O'LiamRoe's.)
Luckily, it's the kind of thing that you come out of and have an enforced rest. (The Dorothy Dunnett Companion will someday sit by me on a re-read. I'm serious! It's got the quotations translated, everything--good move, Ingenious Scholar-Writer, the world was needing that.)
My brain feels so pounded after a story like that, webbing around names and foreign couplets.

Right now, I'm sad to not have an accent.

Oh, of course I talk like something (and it's not the South African graceful something), but when I'm in Boston and say I've been living in OK, hearing that I sound a little southern makes me both smirky and chagrined.

Because I don't belong anywhere.

I'm only bringing this up because with the PTSD by "rachelmanija" and Street Kid Mentality by "kaigou" (my linkety links are not funtioning because I r dumm) talk I've seen going on, I've realized that I've never really talked about the Third Culture Kid phenomena here yet. While it's got nothing on the survivor edginess and flat out hurt aspects of the first two, it's something writers should know about.

Especially because some of the straddling of worlds in YA fantasy fiction and the backstory of lots of fantasy characters involves the same factors and would create some of the same sets of behavior.

I don't have the same audience those two have and not the same amount of authority, (as well as being likely to wax eloquent and certainly return to the topic often) I won't give a lecture quite like the wonderful ones I've linked to. (Which any writer should read!) Wikipedia briefing on what I'm talking about? Here.

But it really matters to me. I want people to know about the Third Culture Kid, and why I'm not quite an American.
My story is that I moved around the US a bit, and when I was 13 my family moved to Japan. I spent my primary teenage years there (turning 17 before we left), like my closest-in-age brother did. My three younger siblings spent the majority of their childhood there, the youngest from 6 mos. to four years old.
We became part of a certain minority group that actually have more in common with people from totally different backgrounds who have had that same experience of living within a culture not their parents', regardless of where those places were. A Japanese/South African girl who lived for a few years in Bhutan I feel an immediate connection with; an American who went to Japan as an English teacher, much more an externals-only connection.
This is because the worldview, cultural paradigm, that a society maintains and passes on (mostly unconsciously) is so fundamentally part of our identities that when a child enters into another they are no longer quite organically part of it. And we really don't know how to deal with that.

So when I say I feel sad about not having an accent, I'm not exaggerating. The cultural disassociation can be a physical sensation of pain, both to be gone from all the many other places I love, and to not fit where I am.

I will never have Mike Mantenuto's wonderfully broad accent. This may be a good thing for the world. It's still disappointing.