Be more Rich

10 years ago I visited my son who was working as a physics teacher in Mexico City. He had written this for his school magazine and I have to say it was one of the proudest moments in my life.

"I’m Rich, and I am the Lead Teacher for Physics at Lancaster. Since living in Mexico I am often asked ‘where are you from?’ I think they expect a

short answer along the lines of ‘The UK’, but I always seem to end up answering ‘Well... I was born in Southampton, however...’ This is a typical problem for a ‘Third Culture Kid’.

A Third Culture Kid, or TCK is someone who has spent a considerable amount of time living outside of the country of which they hold a passport. Generally they struggle to relate to the culture of their country of birth and tend to adopt cultures and mannerisms from the nations they were raised in.

I was born in England in the city of Southampton, home of (in my opinion) the best football team ‘The Saints’. As many of my students would attest I am pretty proud of my hometown not to mention its football club, but in actual fact I, and the rest of my family, have spent only a short time living there.

My father was from Yorkshire and moved to the south coast of England to work for an aviation company. My mother was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) during the time of the British Empire. My mother’s side of the family are Anglo Indian, a term which confuses everyone who is not Anglo Indian! Basically, Anglo Indians are a mixture of English and Indian, there is no specific ratio. Some Anglo Indians have more ancestry from India, some from Britain and even other countries such as Portugal. During the days of the Raj, Anglo Indians held mainly middle class, white-collar jobs, for example my grandfather worked on one of the railway stations. When India gained independence, Anglo Indians were given the option of remaining in India with an Indian passport but running the risk of losing their jobs, move to Britain and become citizens, or move somewhere else in the Commonwealth. Many of my distant relatives chose to move to the sunny climes of Australia, or to the vast wildernesses of Canada and New Zealand. My grandfather chose to move to Yorkshire, with its terrible weather and ‘bland’ food. This is where my Mum and Dad ended up meeting and marrying.

My family relocated to Southampton before I was born and at the age of seven, my Dad was offered a job with a telecommunications company in Beijing. So for three years, from 1993 onwards, I was raised in communist China, this at the time when China started to modernize, and before you could contact your family back home over the internet whenever you felt like it. For a seven year old, it was truly going into the unknown. I loved my time in China, on reflection they were some of the best years of my childhood, and the experiences I had there were extraordinary, ranging from getting lost and having to flag a taxi and travel across the length of the city when I was eight years old, to a drunken businessman offering to adopt me.

After three years in China, my Dad got transferred to the United States, so I spent the next year living in a town just outside of

Washington D.C. I liked my time in D.C., but like many other kids who grew up in many countries, I ended up getting ‘home sick’ for China. I found that whatever country I moved to, I ended up missing the place I just came from.

I returned to the UK when I was in my early teens and completed my schooling there. After I had finished with high school I decided I wanted to have a break from education before going to university, so I moved to Canada for just under a year to the Canadian Rockies. I worked in a hotel as a ‘room attendant’ a fancy name for chalet maid. This allowed me to pay my rent and for me to afford to spend the winter in one of the best ski resorts. While I was there I trained to be a ski instructor. I learnt how to be an instructor in one of the coldest winters: I was outside from 7am to 5pm in minus forty degrees. The guy training my group said if we wanted to be an instructor that we would get frostbite, it was seen as an occupational hazard. I didn’t get full blown frostbite where your feet and hands go black, but on one particularly cold day my hands and feet went white and numb and stayed that way for several days. The examiner leading a group of us, spotted I was in trouble and got me into the warm. Thankfully my fingers and toes are all present and accounted for!

Nearly a year later I returned to the UK and started university in a town in the middle of England called Leicester. I chose to study physics with space science and technology, as one of my greatest passions is aviation and space exploration. I think this is most likely due to my Dad taking me to air shows as a kid, as well as my parents buying me endless model airplane kits, books and recording countless VHS tapes on space and aircraft from the television. After I graduated, I wasn’t sure what to do and I thought that teaching would be a good fit so I stayed in the city to do my teacher training. When my training was completed I stayed in the city to teach physics in a local college. I liked my job and loved where I was living but the third culture kid from China was getting a bit restless after six years in one place. So one day I was browsing a teaching website and saw an advertisement for a physics teacher in Mexico. I thought to myself ‘why not?’ and several months later I found myself on a plane bound for Mexico and here I am."