The Loss of Expertise

Every few months I watch a celebrity host a cooking and travel show. The habit started in high school when my parents moved to an expat compound in the Middle East and we had proper television channels for the first time. The simplicity of watching someone else explain a meal, no high stakes, no drama, just good quality vanilla and a well crusted sirloin making their usual rotations. Maybe, as a TCK, it offered a constancy I craved and didn’t know how to build.

The most recent celebrity cooking show I watched was Tucci in Italy. It followed the usual rhythm. A well-known celebrity travels to a beloved culinary destination and learns the century old lessons from grandparents. While I do love the consistency of these shows, in recent years they leave me with a deep sadness.

There is a shared experience of expertise among families and communities who have not moved in hundreds of years. The often-glamorous celebrity host steps into celebrations that have existed for every year in living memory. They are able to taste dishes made with the same recipes and same ingredients for generations. There is a legacy of knowledge passed down and down and down.

This isn’t exclusive to cooking – as I’ve learned from travel shows and my own interactions, there is a wealth of knowledge distilled from a life unmoved. My husband knows the ins and outs of farming in Louisiana, not because he’s a farmer but because it was a family endeavour and the garnered knowledge was shared. Similarly, friends who have never moved know the seasons of their local neighbourhood, how to harvest the over abundant blueberry tree from their grandmother’s yard, when to climb the peaks, when to camp in the parks, and when to buckle up indoors against the tornadoes.

As a TCK and the mother of a TCK, this inheritance of expertise is something I cannot pass down to my daughter. I can’t teach her the rhythms of a particular place, because I don’t know them. I can’t show her what happens in each season, because I’m at a loss myself. I can’t pass on a traditional craft or a cultural celebration or even an understanding of a local landscape. I can’t recreate century old recipes for her from my family, because they don’t exist, not in the traditional, travel channel sense.

I can only pass down what I’ve learned as the daughter, and granddaughter, of expats.

When I moved to Cambridge as an adult, my grandmother, a lifelong foreigner called me from Texas. She asked how my husband was handling the move since it was his first time living outside the United States. I made an offhand comment that he missed some American snacks. She laughed, then said, “When we lived in London we shopped at Panzers. It has all the American groceries. You two should go there and find something familiar.”

I have no idea how long this shop was in business or how long it catered to American expat clientele. My grandmother lived in London in the ‘70s and this was forty years later. But I held onto the information. She was not a baking or cooking type of grandmother; this was the only culinary advice I had received from her – unless you count her encouragement to buy V8 for “all your fruit and veg needs” while in university. I recognised this as her small token of expertise. She couldn’t tell me how to settle into Cambridge, how to find my way around, what events or clubs to join, because she didn’t know. But she could commiserate with me that living in a new place and missing familiar grocery aisles is difficult and lonely. She could share the name of a shop that gave her comfort on outings in the ‘70s – sharing with me the tradition of expats trying to recreate their childhood dishes with imported food and many, many substitutions.

This may be the only expertise I can pass on to my children. I won’t be able to share the ins and outs of a town, a culture, or even a country because I’m a collection of so many. I’ll pass on pieces of languages and parts of places but hardly anything whole. I lost the potential to be an expert on anywhere, or anything, decades ago.

But, like my grandmother, I can teach certain aspects of life unique to TCKs. I can teach my children how to pack well, how to fill out a customs form, to become efficient at passport applications. I can teach them how to say goodbye well and to greet a new place with anticipation and courage. I can, hopefully, teach them to grieve well and process the losses linked with this Transatlantic existence. I can bequeath the ability to hold many worlds in their hearts.

I’m not sure if TCKs will ever feature on a travel channel. I think we should – just to show that community can be established across borders. At the very least, we could share our expertise on grief, goodbyes, and discovering ourselves again. Some people might enjoy learning from our not-so-traditionally expert selves.

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If you are an ATCK, what are some traditions you have been given through your family? What are some losses you’ve reconciled with as you process this transient life?