On Race, Racism and Identity
by Rachel, born in Nepal, adopted by a British expatriate couple, raised in many countries around the world
Introduction
I am an intercountry and transracial adoptee, born in Nepal and adopted into a white British family. In addition to this, my childhood was spent moving between countries and continents, growing up within expatriate and international school communities. This meant I also grew up as what is commonly referred to as a Third Culture Kid (TCK).
In many ways, my TCK identity is as prominent as my adoptee one. I cannot imagine what it would be like, or who I would be, if I had simply grown up in one country. I say this without any moral high ground or judgement, in much the same way other people would presumably struggle to imagine what it would be like growing up in remote Alaska, for example.
I also want to acknowledge that my upbringing came with significant privilege. I remain genuinely grateful for much of that exposure and the opportunity to experience different cultures and ways of life from a young age.
In this piece I would like to share how race and identity affected me, and how intrinsically it became tied to my own journey in accepting my ethnicity, my adoption, and eventually “coming out of the fog.”
Much of what I explore is not about international childhood itself, but about how the environments I lived in shaped the racial messages I internalised, and the way I came to understand myself as a transracial adoptee, growing up between cultures.
Third Culture Kids & The In-Between
Very briefly, the term Third Culture Kid was originally coined by sociologist Ruth Useem and refers to children who spend a significant portion of their developmental years outside their parents’ passport culture. Ruth Van Reken and David C. Pollock later expanded on this, placing TCKs under the broader Cross-Cultural Kid (CCK) umbrella, which can also include intercountry adoptees and children raised between multiple cultures.
Like many CCKs, TCKs grow up occupying a space “in-between.” They neither fully belong to the host culture nor entirely to their passport culture, instead existing within what Van Reken describes as an “interstitial culture” — a third space created through movement, transition, and shared expatriate experience. For many TCKs, identity becomes less tied to nationality and more tied to the TCK experience itself.
Race, Class & Hierarchy in International Spaces
There can be an assumption that growing up internationally and around different races and nationalities would benefit someone already cross-cultural, such as an intercountry adoptee. However, although the international environments I grew up in appeared multicultural on the surface, race and hierarchy were still deeply present within them. Diversity itself did not contribute to equality.
For example, living in countries in the Middle East, it was very clear how society and race were ordered and built. South Asian migrants were labourers and, even as teenagers, we were aware of the human rights abuses and modern-day slavery taking place around us. Filipino women were often domestic workers. Even schools were, and still are, segregated by nationality and class.
While British and American international schools generally allowed anyone to attend who could afford the fees, there were separate schools with lower entrance fees for different nationalities – Indian schools, Filipino schools and others. Western schools, much like the Western world itself, were often positioned as the gold standard.
Children are incredibly perceptive when it comes to social belonging. Even without explicit conversations about race, many of us quickly learn what is rewarded socially and what is not. Who performs manual labour and who is served. Which passports hold power. Which accents are prestigious. Which schools people attend. Which appearances are celebrated. Which cultures are treated as sophisticated, and which are treated as lesser.
In many ways, the TCK world itself was built around a shared non-belonging. Many of us bonded through movement, transition, and feeling somewhat out of place everywhere. But race still shaped who could move through those spaces comfortably, and who remained visibly different within them.
The Expatriate Bubble
Growing up in this environment, like many of my peers, I desperately wanted to fit in. I wanted proximity to the people I saw celebrated around me and in the media I consumed — the white blonde teens in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The O.C., and One Tree Hill.
In speaking with some of my non-white friends years later, it became apparent that many of us had been trying to move closer to whatever was perceived as white, Western, and socially desirable.
For me, that meant wearing painfully high heels to school, highlighting my hair, and trying to look and act as “European” as my race would allow me to. At times, I even distanced myself from other Asian students.
I now understand much of this as internalized racism and ethnic disidentifcation. I carried a deep shame around not being white, and around being connected to a country Western media often associated with poverty, instability and suffering. It is difficult when one of the first things you see in international news about your birth country is women dying in “period huts.”
I did, however, vehemently resist the narrative of being “saved.” At the time, I could not fully articulate why, but I think now, the idea of rescue only reinforced my lack of belonging. What I wanted was not to feel rescued, but to feel ‘normal’ – for my race, ethnicity, and adoptive origins to no longer mark me as different at all.
So, I did not allow myself to connect to Nepal, and I begrudgingly accepted that I was Brown. All the while, I hid behind my passport and my adoptive culture like a shield. Assimilation and distancing became ways of navigating strict racial hierarchies even within supposedly ‘multi-cultural’ environments.
This was one of the complicated realities of being both a transracial adoptee and a TCK. I was navigating race and identity without any positive cultural mirrors, while often surrounded by other young people of colour trying to survive through similar forms of distancing and adaptation.
Repatriation and the Question of Home
Eventually, and I think crucially, most TCKs leave the expatriate bubble at some point. Many of us simply age out of it. As adults, we often no longer qualify for our parents’ visas, or we return to our passport countries for university, work, or repatriation. Others migrate elsewhere entirely, through study or employment pathways.
We must enter societies that are often far more monocultural in structure, even if increasingly multicultural in population. We begin to adapt one final time, often learning how to live permanently for the first time in our lives, among many people who have been doing so since birth.
That can be a deeply challenging process, and through this process often questions around ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ begin to surface:
What is home?
Where am I from?
Where do I belong?
Who am I?
For me, those questions were naturally deeply entangled with adoption as well.
I can now openly say I am adopted from Nepal in a way I could not when I was younger. I have taken steps to reconnect with and honour parts of my history, even while recognising that my relationship to Nepal will likely always be complex due to not growing up culturally connected.
I still feel connected to both “TCK culture” and my adoptive culture, and there are parts of British culture that feel familiar, but still not entirely mine. There are also countries I lived in for years that shaped me profoundly, yet I do not feel like I can easily claim them either.
I think, in many ways, I am a patchwork of every place that I lived in.
But coming to terms with my identity as both a TCK and an adoptee was not simply about learning to “embrace difference” or reconnect with culture. It also required me to critically examine the beliefs and hierarchies I had absorbed growing up.
Because the environments that shaped me had not only influenced where I felt I belonged, but also how I understood race, value, status, and even my own worth.
What I Eventually had to Confront
I have come a long way from where I hated and resented the aspects of myself that I felt made me different. However, in the process of accepting myself, I also had to reject some of the core beliefs I held about the world.
For instance, if I truly deserved equal respect regardless of my skin colour or ethnic origin – simply on the basis of being human – then logically the widespread and normalised systems of modern slave labour I had witnessed were profound human injustices.
I had to examine and unpick the environments I had grown up in, where entire systems and economies often functioned through racial, ethnic and class inequality. This process did not happen overnight, and in many ways, it is still ongoing.
I had to confront the reality that many of the unspoken beliefs I carried were not objective truths, but products of history, colonialism, imperialism, hierarchies and environment. I had to meet other people of colour who were proud of where they came from. I had to read the words of people who did not hate themselves or their race.
I also had to begin the long process of believing I had inherent worth outside of being adopted, and outside of feeling as though I had been given a special ‘cheat code’ from escaping the poverty so closely associated with Nepal. In my mind, I hold a certain type of survivor’s guilt. A conditional sense of self-worth.
Because beneath everything, and despite resisting the common “lucky” or “grateful” narrative whenever it came from others, I had still deeply internalised the belief that my life had only become valuable once it had been moved closer to whiteness, Westernness, and privilege.
I am only one degree removed from the 6,500 South Asian migrant workers who died working in Qatar following the awarding of the World Cup. Any one of them could have been a father, brother, cousin, or family member I never knew.
Maybe I had even been driven past them.
Learning to confront this reality has been extremely painful at times, but it has also allowed me to approach both myself and other people with far more compassion, kindness and understanding than I once did.
References
POLLOCK, D.C. and VAN RECKEN, R.E., 2009. Third Culture Kids Growing Up Among Worlds. Boston: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Revealed: 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since world cup awarded
Resources
Intercountry adoptees as transracial immigrants in the USA
Lived experience of racism in transracial intercountry adoption
Race resources for adoption professionals and adoptive parents
Lived experience of racism in intercountry adoption (ICAV Perspective Paper)