TCK Interview Part 1.

 

D-L Nelson is the creator of the TCK mystery series. This is the first in a series of interviews with Annie Young, Third Culture Kid, amateur detective, amateur historian and free-lance tech writer and the heroine of the series.

Me:       Can you explain what a third culture kid is?

Annie:   Sure. It is a person born in one culture and they move to another country. They aren’t truly a part of their parents’ culture nor totally a part of the new one.

Me:       So that’s what happened to you?

Annie:   And then some. I was a eight-year-old, happy kid growing up in Maynard, Massachusetts when my father’s company transferred him to Amsterdam. Suddenly, I’m in a Dutch school. It took about six months before I was speaking the language.

Me:       Must have been hard.

Annie:   It was, but I adjusted more or less. Then my father came home one night and said we were moving to Stuttgart, Germany. New school, new language. I guess learning German was easier because it was closer to Dutch than if I’d gone directly from English. My mom had a tutor three times a week for both of us. She’s an artist and like me felt somewhat isolated.

Me:       Why didn’t your parents put you in an international school where English is the language?

Annie:   They thought being bi-lingual or multi-lingual would have great advantages when I started working.

Me:       So you’re trilingual?

Annie:   Quadrilingual. My father was then transferred to Geneva, Switzerland. French. This was our last move though. My father quit the company that bounced him around Europe and started his own technical service company.

Me:       Wow! How did you feel about all the moves?

Annie:   You sound like a shrink. At first I hated it and acted as a brat, but in another way it brought us as a family. My dad and I would go off on historical safaris to try and find interesting things from the past, and that was pretty cool. The real problem it took me years to feel as if I belonged any where and wasn’t an outsider no matter where I went.

Me:       How did that happen?

Annie:   I feel in love with a French flic, a cop.

Me:       And you’ve solved several murder mysteries.

Annie:   Only by accident being where people were killed. I mean what are the chances of visiting my folks and finding a skeleton in their closet?

Me:       We’re out of time, but we’ll pick this interview up tomorrow. I want to hear more about that skeleton.