The One and a Half Culture Kid

It wasn't until I became an expat that I heard the phrase "Third Culture Kid"for the first time. For the uninitiated, Third Culture Kids, or TCKs for short, are kids whose parents are from one culture but who grow up in another culture that neither parent is from.

After spending this past December with D'Assise in the U.S. with my family for the second part of my maternity leave, I've wondered what the appropriate terminology would be for his situation. He's not a Third Culture Kid, because's he's growing up in his own culture, surrounded by people who look like him and speak the same language. But he's also not just a Rwandan kid, either. He's adopted certain American mannerisms and tastes through me. I decided that the appropriate term is probably a One and a Half Culture Kid, an interesting amalgam of both, but not quite fully a Two Culture Kid since we've never lived together in the U.S. before.

Santa Claus: D'Assise is still dubious 

The "one" is for his inherited Rwandan culture. He is, and always will be, Rwandan. His favorite foods are still Rwandan classics like rice and beans, boiled potatoes, and boiled green bananas. When I first adopted him, I tried to send him with an American packed lunch like I grew up with (sandwiches, sliced apples, etc), but his lunch bag came back full every day. Finally, he just told me that he missed having Rwandan food and asked if he could get lunch at school each day.

D'Assise dressed as a traditional Rwandan intore dancer at a friend's wedding

The "half culture" is American culture that he's taken in through me, our American friends and colleagues, and visits to the U.S. (he's spent about 15 weeks in the US over the past year and a half).  D'Assise has taken a liking to some American foods, like pancakes on the weekends and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, just like your average American nine year old kid. He's been sucked in to the world of American sports (although perhaps this is because of the influence of my friend Jeremy, who happily shows him Mets baseball games at every available opportunity...). His English is getting pretty close to fluent and he laces his sentences with Americanisms like "you guys", although he still sometimes structures his sentences in the way that they would be structured in Kinyarwanda, his native tongue (for example, asking "We will go where today?" instead of "Where will we go today?").

Pancakes: D'Assise is 100% on board. 

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He's walking sort of in the middle of these two cultures, not fully in either one. Like many Rwandan kids, he eats some bananas for breakfast each morning, but unlike most Rwandan kids, he eats them with a healthy smear of peanut butter. His song requests when we play cards in the evening are sometimes African artists (Sauti Sol, the Ben, Miriam Makeba, P Square) and sometimes American jams (The Supremes, Lizzo, Beyonce, Macklemore).

A few weeks ago, as we were playing "Guess Who?" before going to bed, D'Assise said something that highlighted his unique position. In between turns, he said, "When we go to America, everyone asks me about Rwanda, and they don't know what it's like. When I'm in Rwanda, I talk to my friends at school about America, about the Children's Museum and the Zoo and ice cream and ice skating and the big ferris wheel, but they don't understand either."

D'Assise trying out ice skating in December

All of this has made me think about the parts of each culture that I want him to inherit, and other parts of each culture that I want him to question. I love that Rwandan culture values community and family so much. Many celebrations just involve spending time with loved ones, and life moves a lot more slowly here in many ways. Yet I also love the energy and drive and tenacity of Americans. I love the amazing fusion of American food and music and art and literature that result from having such a wonderfully diverse country.

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The three most challenging things in navigating this one and a half culture kid situation as a mother who comes from only half of that equation have been how I parent when Rwandan and American culture diverges on how to display affection, crying, and corporal punishment.

The first challenge has been how Rwandans and American differ in expressing our love. Generally speaking, compared to Rwandans, most Americans are pretty open with our emotions and showing and telling people we love that we love them. It's a normal thing in America for mothers to kiss their children, for instance. At funerals I have gone to in America, attendees are often encouraged to hug their loved ones a little closer, and advice columns in American newspapers always advise telling people you love how much you love them before it's too late. My parents told me (and still tell me) "I love you," almost every single day (probably a bit more than normal, but I digress). Below are actual screenshots of a normal messaging conversations between my Mom and I:

This is pretty much the opposite of Rwandan culture. I don't mean to say that Rwandans don't love each other, just that Americans and Rwandans often express it differently. One example to illustrate this point: every single one of my grown Rwandan friends have said that if they were talking to their parents on the phone and said "I love you Dad", their Dad would immediately ask them if they were literally dying or if they urgently needed money. When I talk to my own Dad on the phone and tell him that I love him, his response is almost always, "I love you more!"

Naturally, the cultural divide on emotional openness and displays of affection has been sort of confusing to D'Assise. As an American parent, I say "I love you" about three billion times per day to D'Assise (including multiple extremely embarrassing variations of that, like "I love you more than you'll ever know" and "I love you more than all of the cheese in the world."). I think I say "I love you" even more than I would to my own biological child because I wake up every day feeling like I've won the lottery. The chances of us getting to be a family were infinitesimally, almost impossibly, small, but here we are as a family, six years after first meeting. But for D'Assise, this is kind of weird. He's asked me before, "Why do you need to say I love you every day when I already know how much you love me?" To most Rwandans I know, it doesn't necessarily need to be said, it's just understood.

Even though it's impossible for me to stop telling him how much I love him, I have tried to respect his wishes about other forms of affection. He never likes me to kiss him, whether in public or just at our house, because "none of my friends' Moms ever kiss them." This sort of breaks my Mama heart, but at the end of the day I want to respect that. Hugs are somehow still cool though, and sometimes he'll just ask me for a hug at the end of the day, and it makes my American heart burst.

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The second thing that has been challenging parenting my little one and half culture kid has been differing views on crying and talking through difficult emotional topics. This might sound dumb, but I actually think about it a lot. In my six years in Rwanda, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen Rwandans cry. This includes attending genocide remembrance ceremonies, hearing testimonials from close friends about their own harrowing experiences during the genocide and its aftermath, and funerals. Even when D'Assise was just a toddler, if he ever cried for any reason, the nuns would slap him in the face and say, "Don't cry. Only weak people cry." This was not at all unusual. The cultural norm in Rwanda is that crying (especially for men, and especially in public) is taboo. I've definitely witnessed this in the U.S. as well, but to a much greater extent in Rwanda.

Stoicism, keeping a stiff upper lip, and not necessarily expressing emotion are valued much more highly in Rwanda than they are in America (there's a Rwandan comic who has a sketch about how the difference between American friends and Rwandan friends is that you can be friends with an American for five minutes and know all about their love life, their divorce, their battle with cancer, and you can be friends with a Rwandan for five years and not know their last name).

I want D'Assise to know that I don't have any tolerance for being dramatic or a crybaby, like pretending to be hurt in soccer to get attention when he's not really hurt or whining when he doesn't get his way, but that there is absolutely nothing wrong with crying if you're feeling overwhelmed or sad. There is no harm in talking about how you're feeling with someone you trust; this is not a sign of weakness. When I try to talk to the nuns about this, they scoff at me and say that I'm going to raise a weak man, but I am more afraid of creating a man who suppresses his own emotions and bottles everything up and can't talk about it. I hope he questions the pressure for people, (men especially) to be un-emotional and strong, to not ever cry or to rarely share feelings.

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A third cultural difference is on corporal punishment. While people in my parents' generation or grandparents' generation would likely have experienced corporal punishment when they were kids, I think there has been a sea change in American culture, and I know very few people in my generation who say they would ever beat their children. I personally could never in a million years beat D'Assise, no matter what he does. I just wouldn't have the heart to ever do it, nor do I think it's actually effective.

However, corporal punishment is definitely the norm in Rwanda today. The only fight I ever got in with the nuns I lived with at my Peace Corps site was when D'Assise was just three. One of the nuns had just brought in a larger pitcher of fresh milk from our cows, and just minutes later, our resident convent toddler knocked it over, smashing the pitcher and splattering the milk everywhere. Although the American aphorism teaches us not to cry over spilt milk, our Mother Superior picked up a stick and began beating poor D'Assise with it. Tears streamed down his little face and he began crying out for mercy. I stood between my Mother Superior and told her to stop it. I couldn't bear watching him getting beaten for something that was just a mistake and that he was too young to understand.

My Mother Superior paused, utterly shocked at why I was standing in between her and D'Assise. It was this moment of complete cultural confusion. To her, I was spoiling the child by sparing the rod--he needed to be beaten to show him not to do it again. To me, an innocent three year old was getting the stuffing knocked out of him for doing what three year olds do, and I was horrified.

D'Assise at three <3

Even now, six years later, I had to send D'Assise to school with a note that said "Please don't beat my child. Thank you." It's common for teachers to use corporal punishment on kids who are late to school or who misbehave in class. My nanny once asked me if I could give her permission to beat D'Assise when he did something wrong (I had forbidden her to ever lay a hand on him). I don't know if this is something that is going to change anytime soon in Rwanda; most Rwandans in my generation also say they would use corporal punishment on their kids. For the moment, I think D'Assise is happy to agree with my American views on this particular topic.