Bridge People

The identity of the global nomad/TCK lends itself to the act of bridging: continents, governments, relationships, subcultures,schools of thought, war zones, nationalities. Global nomads straddle the dizzying chasms between different groups their entire lives.
Marie Arana, author of American Chica, a memoir of her life straddling her father's Peruvian family and her mother's Wyoming ranch family, writes beautifully about this tension:

"I love to walk a bridge and feel that split second when I am neither here nor there, when I am between going and coming, when I am God's being in transit, suspended between ground and ground. You could say that it's because I'm an engineer's daughter and curious about solid structures. I've always been fascinated by the fit of a joint, the balance in trestles, the strength of a plinth. Or you could say it's because I'm a musician's daughter, who knows something about the architecture of instruments. I've pulled string over a bridge on a violin, stretched it tight, anticipated sound.
It could be, perhaps, because I am neither engineer nor musician. Because I'm neither gringa nor Latina. Because I 'm not any one thing. I live on bridges; I've earned my place on them, stand comfortably when I'm on one, content with betwixt and between.
I've spent a lifetime contemplating my mother and father, studying their differences. I count both their cultures as my own. But I'm happy to be who I am, strung between identities, shuttling from one to another, switching from brain to brain. I am the product of people who launched from one land to another, who slipped into other skins, lived by other rules-yet never put their cultures behind them..."