Migratory Patterns

Barbara Chen got her first taste of China in 1989 (what timing!), fell in love, got married, and after a stint back in the US, has called Beijing home for the last 18 years. During that time she's raised a bi-cultural family and now works as a recruiter for an American university, helping Chinese kids make the leap to the west for their education. But, as she taught me, Chinese students who want to go overseas actually have to enter a western-style education system long before they even take the SAT. This required exit from the domestic system has created a kind of parallel world where Chinese kids end up code switching between school and home, essentially migrating internally before they migrate to another country. She also taught me a new term: "Cross-culture kids"

Born in America, Mio Rudnicki grew up as a TCK, bouncing around the world as part of a multicultural family. In essence, she's been a migrant all of her life. So when she ended up in the US for high school and college, the experience that most of us take for granted was a huge culture shock for her. How do you navigate your daily life when you're surrounded by your fellow countrymen, but they're all completely and utterly foreign to you? It brings a whole new level of dread to that first day in the cafeteria when you're looking for a place to sit down for lunch. And after school is over, what then? How do you define yourself once the familiar social structures of educational institutions are gone? It's a problem that her engineering mind is just now starting to figure out.

When I met Dr. Kate Bailey Gardner in Boston in the mid-1990s she felt, as she says, "Like a bit of a social outcast." The term "TCK" was still new and she was coming to terms with her identity as a kid raised overseas who had moved back to her passport country for college. She's been on a journey to find herself and what "Home" means for her ever since. It's a #MigrationStory that's taken her from Hong Kong & Singapore to Boston, then to Beijing, then back to Boston, then to West Hartford, CT, then, with her children in tow, to Shanghai, and, finally, back to Hong Kong again. Has she finally found her place? Could her place be right back where she started?

Listen to episode #021 to hear my interview with Kate's husband, Josh Gardner, and to get the flip-side of this family's migration story. Kate & Josh are an amazing couple and their parallel journeys of self-discovery, both at "home" and abroad, are a microcosm of what millions of other families are going through all around the world.

We humans have a deep need for community- none more so than we humans who are living outside of our places of origin. The power of community organizing is twofold: We not only make ourselves feel like we fit and belong in a place, but it also helps us discover more about ourselves. The overseas journey of my guest this week, Abe Sorock, began as a member of the Moishe House project, which sent him down a road of self-discovery. Did he help to organize the community, or did it organize him? His current with with the Global Shapers project is an extension of this idea- The need for community to help with mentorship. As Abe notes, with younger expats there are usually lots of folks around who are either in your age cohort or who are really senior. There is a shortage of mid-level role-models and advisers. So community is necessary... This current generation has witnessed massive change and has found themselves having to live in ways that nobody has taught them how to live. And this goes double for those of us who are living overseas. Then there's the challenging notion of people who have been outside of the US for the last decade as being "The Last Americans."

My good friend Adriana, who I have known since she first moved to China from her native Romania back in 2011, is a person I've always admired. From an early age she stood out from her cohort- people who came of age just as their country emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. She discovered Couchsurfing in its early days and was an active member of the community, constantly hosting visitors from abroad. Those interactions showed her that there was a big, fascinating world out there and she's been exploring it ever since, traveling through countless counties through the last decade. She sat down with me during my recent visit to Shanghai, and we had a deep discussion about the nebulous "thing" that seems to lie within everyone who chooses to migrate. Are we born this way? What triggers the desire to move, to explore ourselves by searching for new opportunities over the horizon?

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It'd be tough to find someone who has had a more successful #MigrationStory than PT Black, but it's also one that you would not expect. He grew up in a famous Boston neighborhood, was able to get into top schools and then launch a career in international business in New York. But after watching the second plane fly into the World Trade Center from his apartment in Brooklyn, he felt like he needed to choose an alternate path. He landed in Shanghai just a few months later. Now, after a career in market research and development that has had him at the forefront of China's historic transformation into a modern world-leading economy, he finds himself reflecting on how he's changed from the "China Guy" to the "Guy Who Knows China," and whether there is a way for him to ever go "home" again.

• Check out Daphne's company, Superhuman: http://www.daphnecheng.com/