Hidden Context

"Once I knew a charm to bring a snail out of its shell, but it was in a language I no longer know in a country I shall never live in again...There was an unalterable otherness that comes from being raised in a very different time and place, perhaps one that has made me a perpetual traveler..I shall always know that the bridge of my nose is too high."
Betsy-raised in China

TCKs often have a fascinating backstory that never seems relevant in their passport country. They have a context that has shaped them that is completely hidden from the world that they have re-entered and are currently navigating. This issue is addressed in the book Hidden Immigrants- Legacies of Growing Up Abroad by Linda Bell. In it a TCK describes what it is like to access her hidden context after many years:

"...I hadn't been in Africa for many, many years- not since Zaire in 1975...So I thought, how much of this is left from my childhood?...Is there anything that is really in me, or was it just an experience? We touched down in Nairobi and I was right back home in five seconds..the closeness of the atmosphere, the humidity, the hibiscus- everything was just screaming. " You're home, you're home!"...then..out on safari, and all of a sudden this stuff I didn't know I knew started coming out of my mouth which I didn't know I knew about these animals, about their habits and about how rock hyraxes are the closest relative to the elephant. Everybody looked at me like, "You're out of your mind"..It was all stuff I had learned from being on safaris before in East Africa and just stuff I accumulated; information that had been totally useless to me all the rest of my life and had never come out of hiding...So there are all these compartmentalized bits of knowledge that I never use in this country- and never have the right clues to open the floodgates and tap into that stuff. Yet under the right circumstances, obviously, it's right there."