Her Third Culture Life Echoes Across the Years

There are things we — I — took for granted for so many years, and usually didn’t even think of or consider for all those years. Through the formidable  resources of the World Wide Webs and this Post-Examiner universe, I met a person who had lived in just about every area of the planet, or so it seemed.

Just on a related side note: As I’m currently typing away on this she is in Tahiti (I’m so envious).

This is Kathy Gamble Pilugin. She had authored a book called Expat Alien; My Global Adventures, about her life around the world. Expat Alien, What’s that? An expatriate is a person that lives outside their nation and an alien is a person who lives in a country without that citizenship. As we have seen so dramatically since the convicted felon took office in January.

Since Ms. Gamble Pilugin, the author has lived outside her country (the United States) she was an expatriate and when she returned to live in the U.S., primarily in the Twin Cities, Minnesota and Texas, she felt like an alien because she wasn’t in sync with the American culture she had missed in her earliest years.

At a boarding school in Texas, Kathy learned the unwritten rules of being a teenager in high school, the bullying and tribal ways that separated various groups of students from each other.

From living in the U.S., Kathy’s mother told her why it is good to be from this nation, “My mother tried to instill one value in me about America that has always stuck with me and made me glad I had an American passport. She explained what made America great and different from most countries was that everybody had the right to voice their opinion and fight for their ideas, hopes, and dreams. She thought this caused continual change and change was good because it kept things fresh and young and in turn encouraged new ideas. Although sometimes, the changes were not all that great.”

When she was 15 Kathy went to Bogotá with her parents when her dad was the Ford Foundation’s Representative for Colombia and Venezuela. She explains the difference between the school in Texas and the school in Bogotá. “At fifteen, I had just finished my freshman year in Texas. I would be going to the international school in Bogotá. It was good to be back in Latin America, with ‘my people’— expats, TCKs, people from all over; this was a culture I felt comfortable with.”

“TCK” stands for Third Culture Kids.

A steady theme runs through this book: picking up and moving to different nations and continents. What might sound exciting and exotic to us, was a bad experience for the author.

After a year in Colombia the family moved again, this time to Africa, via Miami, Florida. For you and I going from South America to Africa sounds like a great idea, but for someone who spends her life moving from one nation to another, meeting new people and making new friends, plus learning new cultures and languages, one year is just not long enough.

“Constantly saying goodbye to friends is not all that easy. I had to learn to compartmentalize things. I had to live in the present and tell myself: I can’t think about last year. I have to focus on this year. These people, this place, this culture, this language. And so, a lot of the time things never got resolved. The grief of leaving people and places and things behind was never addressed. It just sat there in the background.”

Maybe some of us watched too many James Bond and other spy movies thinking places like Lagos, Nigeria would be a nice place to visit. For Kathy, the stench, trash and abject poverty were so bad — worse than anything she encountered  in the Americas she couldn’t wait to get to her boarding school.

Here’s something I learned from Kathy that is very fascinating: the “Migratory Instinct” of Expat Aliens,  “For some TCKs you will see, however, a migratory instinct seems to control their lives — manifesting in frequent job changes, moves to new locations and constantly changing relationships. I believe that for them, a sense of rootlessness is at the heart of the restlessness. They can’t settle down, even when they want to.”

Some of us stateside kids can probably relate to that. For me, going off to the Marines for the better part of four years  left me longing to live in some of the places I had been stationed, like various spots in Southern California, near Camp Pendleton, or in Hawaii (which I only visited) Japan and Okinawa. Even the high desert around 29 Palms,

After more reading I also understand my experiences are nothing like Kathy’s. My feelings of restlessness and rootlessness were quenched once I settled in San Diego. Sure, I’ve lived at three different address here. But I’m comfortable with the community that I have joined with my friends.

Because of her college education — and probably from her life living around the world — learned women have options, other than the usual –get married and start a family.” She returned to Nigeria, broke off a relationship and began her life as a somewhat free person. She was not bound by the rules, unless she wanted that experience.

She did get married to a man from my hometown, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He got a job at a newspaper on the Gulf Coast of Florida and they eventually settled down in Dunedin, Florida, another place I have spent time.

Because of her wanderlust lifestyle, it’s easy to relate to Kathy at some points. TCK’s have the same emotions, confusion and questions, the same dilemmas as  we “stateside” kids. Because Roe V Wade was decided in 1973, women could finally decide whether they wanted to have a child or terminate a pregnancy.

That is something to note because women no longer have the right to choose what they do with their bodies throughout the U.S. since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Kathy and her new husband Nicholas went to Moscow, Russia right after the Cold War ended when our perceived notion was that the defunct Soviet Union was now in disarray and chaos. What Kathy saw on that first trip is best read in this book because it will give you a picture of the day-to-day life in Moscow in the early 1990s.

Every chapter has something to think about and to learn. Kathy lived a long time in Russia with her then husband and son. Her observations on how Russia slipped into the Vladimir Putin era are very interesting to anyone that id paying attention to the political situation today.

Kathy has settled in Minnesota now, but manages to travel as much as possible. As Kathy says in the Afterword: “I will probably always be rootless and restless.

You can purchase this book at the online sellers.