My Passport Says I’m Home But It Doesn’t Feel That Way.
‘Where are you from?’ That’s an interesting question for most ‘third culture kids’ who’ve grown up in countries outside of the one on their passport. When people ask me that question, I usually answer that it’s more of a ‘when’ than a ‘where’ question. I’m from Kansas and Texas and California and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Tehran, Iran and Oahu and the Big Island of Hawai’i and presently I’m from Wellington, New Zealand. Ask me again in five years and I’ll probably be from somewhere else.
I spent the 1970s as a child living in the Middle East, first in Saudi Arabia for five years and then in Tehran, Iran for four. My father was a defense contractor who taught the ways of maintaining a tactical Air Force to the Arabs and then to the Iranians. I was just a goofy kid doing all the things that goofy kids do but in a much different locale than my cousins back in the United States.
I had just started my senior year at Tehran American School when the revolution poured into the streets. I was young and oblivious to the political battles waging across the country. My thoughts didn’t go much farther than ‘I want to rock’n’roll all night and party every day’, and Tehran was a great city for that with nightclubs, no drinking age, cheap taxis with drivers more than willing to sell you hashish, and back then, there were no cell…
