Geoffery

**__A fragment of Jeff’s memory__** by Geoffery I laid my back on the red, hot tiles on the roof as usual, thinking about "What I've Done”. The reason why I chose the roof as my spot is because of its view, you can do lots of different things up there such as sunbathing, enjoying the winds [this is the best part, I realized that the winds never stop because our house is quite near to the river], therefore it’s a great place to relax. By the way, I’m Jeff, a 16 year-old boy, to most of the people who knows me they’ might think that I'm an active, funny or goofy kid... but in fact, that’s just a mask, at home I’m a completely different person. I like to be alone, mom and dad always try to encourage me to hang out with friends, go to parties or just talk to somebody and…well to tell the truth…most of the time they fail to get me of the roof/bed…even now I’ve discovered out a new way to be alone, and it’s “go for a walk”. While I’m looking up to the clouds upon the bright blue sky, something came back to me… Last night, I talked to a friend who I don’t normally talk to, he’s been my classmate for quite a while but the number of time I speak to him is quite small…and after a while “chatting” to him, I felt a similarity between me and him, I felt my past, old time when I was only a little child...my eyes started to fill with “water” I tried to stop the flow but it seems impossible.

I have never been welcome by other mates in primary school; I didn’t know why they hate me so much. Every time I approach a group, it started to break down and the only one left behind was always me, even though I tried my best. However, when I’m trying to walk on my own, they’ll do something to stop me in other words… “Stand in my way”. And in the long term, it started to make me depressed, I started to create my own world, where there’s only me. Despite everything they said or did to me, I felt good for having this world most of the time, but somehow, the intuition inside me always tell me that I was missing something in this world. After a while living in my own lonely world, I started to feel “old”, not physically but mentally, days seemed really long, I started to wonder how long can I stay is this world because this wasn’t what I wished for...

I’ve just learned that I’m a Third Culture Kid, TCK for short. I did a small research on the word a few weeks ago when my English teacher mention about it. At first I thought that sounded a little strange, like a disease you get by travelling to too many far-off continents, but people assured me that it was nothing scary. It’s just a phrase people use to call people like me, people with complicated origin like born in Vietnam, live in Australia for preschooler years but family origin was in China. And Being a TCK might be the reason that made they used to hate me so much, the problem here was “being different”, I’m odd to them because I have two passports, I can speak three languages, I do things differently and whole lot of differences in me compared to other “native Vietnamese” which takes over 99.99% of the school population.

I hated when people started to ask me about my identity, it always led to a question that I can never answer and that question is “where are you from?” I used to spent lots of time being alone try to answer that question, but it seemed that the answer that I’ve been searching for years never appear. Therefore most of the people who ask me about my origin, won’t receive any true answer from me, most of the time. I try to ignore them, change to another subject or just simply give them a random place between Vietnam, Australia and China.

My life reached to another turning point when I started to have my own power by being “leader of the class”, this title was of course elected by my homeroom teacher, and from there friends started to came closer to me but still it’s just their shells, on the outside they tried to be nice, good to me but I know deep inside their minds, I’m just a “tool” for them to archive their own goals. Although I knew that I was used, I can’t fight back, simply because I want a friend and in addition, back on my side…nobody is there to help…These things only last for 2 school years but to me it was just like 10 years or more, because I felt the heaviness on my shoulders every school day and it made the time flows slowly.

I used to think that school was a dreadful place filled with hatred, classmates looked at me as if I one little thread in a school for “normal” kids like them. Whenever I thought about these years, sorrow filled my heart, I used to think that was all because I was a born as a TCK, and just when things about the get worse, my life encountered another turning point which drove me into a completely new world.

Things started to get better when I be able to get together with another TCK named Nick. I didn’t know if he noticed, that he was my saviour at the time that he was the only “true friend” at that time. We came together quite easy, I think it was because he and me shared the same problem, and we’re still only a small part of the community. We talked nearly every time we can, and I recognized that I was a lot happier than I used to be a lot, I also found out that friendships was the part that I was missing in my world, a world isn’t a place there’s just you and loneliness, it’s a place where you can feel happy...

A change in the wind woke me up from the flashbacks, it’s getting cooler, the sun was sinking leaving a crimson mark on the horizon, and a faded image of the moon started to became clearer, I climbed of the roof, heading straight to the dining room...