EVENT: Asian Studies Seminar Series

Young people at international schools (who are often referred to as Third Culture Kids) are expected to be “international” and open to difference by virtue of their education and transnational upbringing. However, the processes involved in becoming “international” are fraught with tensions because they are embedded within national and global structures of power. This paper interrogates the ways in which issues of culture, “race” and class intersect and influence the experiences and identities of Asian students at an international high school in Indonesia. As contradictory as it may seem, some Asian students who were more Westernized than others tended to identify more as “Asian”. For some, becoming more Korean or Japanese was mutually constitutive with becoming Asian, becoming Western, and becoming international. This paper argues that becoming Asian is an expression of mutual intelligibility forged across difference that develops within transnational social spaces like that of the international school. However, international schools fail to recognize becoming Asian as cosmopolitan practice because their Eurocentric focus overlooks the diversity of cosmopolitan practices that emerge out of the cultural inequalities present in transnational social spaces. Data are drawn from a yearlong ethnographic research that I carried out a in 2009, consisting mainly of participant-observation of high school students (grades 9 to 12) at an international school catering to foreign expatriate and upper-middle class Indonesian families. I also conducted in-depth interviews with over a hundred and thirty students, school staff, parents, and alumni.