Boat Kids and TCKs

Getting to know other Third Culture Kids, I’ve had a realisation: growing up on a boat makes the TCK experience pretty damn different. The ‘typical’ experience is to move every two or three years from place to place, school to school, and really only feel at home in an airport because you’ve travelled so much.

Yeah, the boat life makes that look downright stable.

Growing up, My family moved every few weeks. Our longest stay was in Panama for six months, and that was only to renew our passports. Then we crossed the canal and into the Pacific ocean, immediately going to the Galapagos islands, where the longest staying permit we could afford was three weeks or so.

Other TCKs are known for their empathy and charisma; coping strategies evolved from joining multiple schools in short spans of time and having to completely rebuild their social lives every time. As a boat kid? You have no social life. There are very few families on boats, and even when you do find the proverbial needle in a haystack that is another boat kid, you’re still going to be moving away in a week or so.

This makes boat kids extremely capable of becoming fast friends. When I was younger, I would immediately give my life story over to a new friend, along with all my opinions and interests and personality quirks, because there wasn’t time to disseminate this information slowly. Other boat kids were the same, and it was great.

…Until we moved onto land and into regular schools, where all of a sudden what had been ‘charisma’ on the boats turned to ‘freakishness’ in the eyes of other kids. We might as well have been a different species when it came to friendship and communication styles.

‘I remember when I was in Peru, there was this-‘

‘You’re so random!’ Said one of my fresh high school friends. ‘Everything you say is like, when I was in Peru, when I was in Ecuador, there’s nothing like, yeah, I went to the supermarket the other day.’

And she was right, and then I saw the looks on everyone else’s faces, and I knew. They thought I’d been bragging, like some posh girl who goes to Thailand on a gap year and comes back ‘enlightened’ with a 3 hour powerpoint of every sweaty hostel she stayed in. How were they to know that this was how boat kids talk? We share our experiences of places we’ve been, things that happen on the boats, travel and food, etc, in casual conversation. It’s not a big thing, or showing off; it’s just how life is.

Peru had been my life for a month, and I’d only been in the UK for two weeks at this point. I’d always labelled myself as a confident, funny, and charismatic person. But now I had no experiences relatable enough to be funny or charismatic. To these girls, the story of the time I nearly drowned in shark-infested Pacific waters was a harrowing and flashy tale; to me, it was a funny story. I’d never been to a British supermarket, or town centre. Hell, I’d never crossed a road on my own before I was fourteen years old. I didn’t know how to fundamentally function on land, nevermind in school.

Most TCKs are bilingual. On boats, you talk to boat people. Most boat people are European or American, so there’s always an abundance of English-speakers around you, even when you go out. When you’re moving around so much, what’s the point of learning the language where you are, anyway? It’ll be useless in a fortnight. I’m still embarrassed at how shocking my Spanish is, despite considering myself at least partly Suramericana. On a boat, you simply aren’t exposed to local culture in the same way you are if you live in a house and go to school.

That isn’t to say you’re a tourist on a boat, either. It’s a grey area where yes, you are in a place for a short period of time, but you also live there. In a week, you come to know where the locals eat because it has the best food, you come to know where is safe and where to avoid, what the locals are like, how they dress and act and talk. Most boat people shun tourist traps at every opportunity.

On a boat, you are simultaneously a traveller and a local everywhere you go. This is also a part of the TCK experience, of course, but with a different flavour. I can talk to a TCK who lived in the same parts of Ecuador I know, and yet our experiences are completely different. Our grasp of the local language is completely different, and our perception of the place is also different. It’s a sore wound for me as I begin to grasp my third culture identity, fumbling with it like a bar of soap in the bath.

That isn’t to say I wish I’d lived on the land. I’ve been doing that for six years now, and it kinda sucks. What do you mean you can’t just hoist anchor and leave if you hate your neighbours? What do you mean you only travel two weeks a year?

No, I love my boat life, filling me with the beauty of impermanence and a thousand sunsets painting watercolour-orange over the sky, listening to the waves and staring at the horizon, hoping to see the green flash. I love the snippets of culture I have absorbed, the crazy people I’ve met, and the way life on the water has made me ready for anything.

I guess that’s another thing boat kids have in common with other flavours of TCK: we wouldn’t change our uniqueness at all, even if we could.