As a ‘third culture kid’ (TCK), I never quite felt at home anywhere. Patriotism remained a foreign concept and while it was easy to state, “I am half English and half Singaporean (or Indonesian, technically speaking)” whenever people asked, I never felt like I fitted in with either ‘cultural identity’.
In England recently, I felt distinctly Singaporean and on my return to Singapore, vice versa. I even earned the nickname ‘Coconut’ at my first job out of university because while I was ‘brown on the outside’, my colleagues considered me ‘white inside’.
It is a difficult feeling to wrap your head around and become comfortable with but despite the slight struggle, it always felt like it put me at some kind of advantage. Not having one fixed cultural identity made it easy to segway into others. Local customs that would seem shocking to some never seemed overly bizarre.
Like a cultural chameleon, becoming a part of my surroundings but still being able to observe as an outsider, has always been of great benefit to me as a traveller.
Hotel’s beautiful garden café in Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka.
I had never really considered it a quality that could translate into a business opportunity until I found myself sitting in a beautiful garden café of a hotel in Arugam Bay in Sri Lanka, run by two ‘TCK millennials’ (like myself) of Sri Lankan origin but with hospitality experience gained in both the USA and Australia.
Their business was unlike any other establishment in the area. They seemed to know exactly what people wanted, striking a balance between providing all the comforts and familiarity of your local hipster café from home but accented with motifs of your current surroundings. Hammocks hung limp between short palm trees and customers ranged from topless men and bikini-clad surfers to young families. It felt bizarrely familiar but foreign, all at the same time, like you were just spending time in your favourite coffee joint but somehow totally translocated to a totally different part of the world.
Their café has the same characteristics of modern grassroots businesses – they support local producers, aim to manage themselves sustainably and have a fundamental respect for the environment and community they are in. That being said… there is something that separates them from the rest. The brother-and-sister duo that runs the place felt like familiar company rather than just a couple of friendly people in a foreign country and were weirdly relatable in the way that you felt as though you’d known them all along.
While other venues in Arugam Bay boasted budget traveller-friendly prices, theirs were in fact much higher, but visitors seemed more than happy to pay them. It was as if their obviously international backgrounds somehow created a trustworthy quality about them.
As a foreigner, you just know these guys are somewhat on the same wavelength as you and that you can communicate with ease. Attempts at banter were met with chuckles while blank stares and polite smiles were given in response to a joke that clearly would not have translated well otherwise in a Sri Lankan setting. Yet, most critically, I think it is their ability to bridge the gap between you as a tourist and local culture as a sort of buffer zone that made them and their business the success is so obviously is.
Picture perfect holiday spot.
They have everything going for them. They speak both local and foreign languages (in this case, English, Sinhalese, plus ‘Australian and American’ patois), which surely comes in handy when co-ordinating between both staff and guests. Their international experience means that perhaps they were better at noticing where gaps in the market were when setting up their business – like being able to provide the only good cup of coffee I had during my time in Sri Lanka – and what qualities are needed for it to do well. They are perfect mediators between what tourists want and figuring out how to translate it into a Sri Lankan context.
Their establishment is far removed from the days of just any Westerner showing up and opening a business in a foreign country to provide a ‘comfort zone’ and the ‘familiarities of home’ for visiting tourists. It is reflective of the need to understand how things operate both where you are and elsewhere, where critical differences lie, and how to adapt between the two.
While the ‘TCK millennial’ pair is not entirely local, neither are they entirely foreign. They are almost like a new wave of ‘foreign’ presence. A hybrid intercultural takeover that digests a local culture into a more palatable format for newcomers who are perhaps not as prepared to give up their bourgeois creature comforts like air conditioning and single origin espresso.
With their international experience, they brought over the tastes and preferences of an (for lack of a better word) ‘expat’ palate without straying too far from still channelling the spirit of the locale they are in. Instead of the customary ‘rice and curry’, visitors could expect toasted paninis and chia-almond milk smoothies, served by a sun-kissed man with dreadlocks (or just terribly tangled hair). Though if you did feel particularly adventurous one day and did want to try true blue authentic cuisine, they would not hesitate to tell you exactly where their favourite spots lie.
I do not know whether this form of business can be considered harmful or beneficial to the surrounding area as it obviously competes with the pure local establishments. It echoes the same characteristics of those small businesses now accused of ‘gentrifying’ parts of London such as Brixton and edging out local businesses and poorer members of the community.
The kind of place that feels entitled to charge premium prices because they label menu items with buzzwords like ‘artisanal’ and ‘locally-produced’. This said, I confess that I cannot fight the fact that as a first-time visitor to the area, discovering this little spot of sunshine was still a highlight of my trip and became a haven of my day-to-day normality during my stay in Arugam Bay.