This cross cultural family


I am an Adult Third Culture Kid. I live in Thailand with my German-Thai husband and our three kids.

Our kids are born and raised in Thailand and have from birth been interacting with the household staff and Thai relatives in Thai; with me in Japanese; and with their father in German.

Linguistically, the older two can read and write in Japanese, especially since starting Japanese school. The eldest, Engineer (9), can also read a bit of German and - extrapolating from the German rules! - English words, while Tigerlily (7) arguably speaks the best English out of them all. The youngest, our bouncing Entropy (3), talks Thai non-stop followed by Japanese, and has about four words in German.

I myself am English-Japanese bilingual, with rudimentary understanding of German and Thai, and some remnants of Spanish learned as a student.

As you can imagine, it's a big linguistic experiment in our household...but as a TCK, I'm also worried and fascinated with how these children are going to process their self-identities.

Will they identify themselves primarily as Thai because they've been living here all their lives? As Japanese because that's what they inculcate in you when you attend Japanese school?

Let's see where this adventure takes us!

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