Growing up half Thai: life between two homes

The suitcase is half full of presents before you’ve packed a single T-shirt. Chocolate for the aunties, something for Yai, a bag of things your mum swore she couldn’t find in Thailand. Then a long flight, a wall of warm air at the airport, and a whole family waiting at arrivals. If you’re luk khrueng, you probably know this feeling: you aren’t going on holiday. You’re going to your other life.

What is it like growing up half Thai?

For many of us it means two lives running in parallel. One is the everyday one: school, friends, the country on your other passport. The other comes in big, bright doses: a trip back every summer, or every other summer, followed by a long wait. Thai has a word for that trip, กลับบ้าน (glap baan), “going home”, and families often use it for your trip too.

Neither life is the “real” one. Classmates may never have seen the second one, and maybe you stopped trying to explain it. That doesn’t make it smaller. สองโลก (sorng lok), “two worlds”, isn’t a split. It’s more.

Why do you feel like a different person in Thailand?

Because in a way you are, and that’s fine. In Thailand you have a different name (probably a nickname), a different place in the family, different food at every meal, and a language that puts you somewhere specific: the หลาน (laan), the grandchild, the one everyone looks after.

The first few days, your Thai feels rusty. By the end of the trip it has woken up, and then you fly home. That rhythm isn’t failing. It’s how Thai lives in a family that’s far away.

The arrival is the easy bit, because one line covers it. Text it to the family LINE group as you land, or say it in the car park:

มาถึงแล้ว

maa thueng laew

มาถึงแล้วครับ

maa thueng laew khrap

มาถึงแล้วค่ะ

maa thueng laew kha

Who is speaking?

ครับ said by a manค่ะ said by a woman

Draft: waiting for a native speaker’s review.

If the trip itself is the stressful part, our guide to which passport to use when entering Thailand covers the airport side.

Why can’t you go deep with cousins you love?

You laugh with your cousins, eat with them, mess around in the back of the pickup. But the deeper talk, about dreams and worries and who you really are, stays just out of reach. Thai calls them ลูกพี่ลูกน้อง (luuk phii luuk norng), and the word is warmer than the conversation sometimes manages to be.

Usually that’s language, not love. Researchers describe heritage speakers on a range, from people who mainly understand to people who are fully fluent, and many sit somewhere in between, understanding more than they say. Jokes and food travel well across that gap. Feelings need more words. The gap is real, it’s common, and it can close slowly, one honest question at a time.

It also says nothing about how Thai you are. A 2022 study of 133 adult heritage bilinguals in the US linked identifying with the heritage culture to understanding the language and to learning it through family and reading. Speaking isn’t the only thing that counts. Your listening counts too.

Why is coming home after Thailand so strange?

There’s a name for that wobble: reverse culture shock, sometimes called re-entry shock. Coming back to your usual culture after getting used to another one can bring the same disorientation as arriving somewhere new. Many people find it more surprising and harder than the original shock. Part of it is that people tend to assume home hasn’t changed.

So you land, and the house feels too quiet. Dinner is one dish instead of seven. Nobody has asked if you’ve eaten yet, which in Thai is basically how people say they care (more on that in have you eaten yet?). Your friends ask how the holiday was, and “fine” is all that fits. That ache is a sign you had somewhere to miss.

Before you fly, this is the line that says what the whole trip meant:

ขอบคุณที่ดูแลหลานนะ

khorp khun thii duu lae laan na

ขอบคุณที่ดูแลหลานนะครับ

khorp khun thii duu lae laan na khrap

ขอบคุณที่ดูแลหลานนะคะ

khorp khun thii duu lae laan na kha

Who is speaking?

ครับ said by a manค่ะ said by a woman

Draft: waiting for a native speaker’s review.

Where’s home when you’re half Thai?

The question comes from all sides. “Where are you from?” at school. “Where did you grow up?” from a taxi driver in Bangkok. And quietly, from yourself.

Researchers have been circling it for decades. The term “third culture kid” was coined by Michigan State University professor Ruth Useem for children who grew up abroad because of a parent’s work. The best-known definition, from David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, describes someone who builds relationships to all the cultures around them “while not having full ownership in any”, and notes that many of these kids can’t answer “where is home?”.

Strictly, most luk khrueng aren’t third culture kids. But later editions of Pollock and Van Reken’s book widened the frame to “cross-cultural kids”, and that explicitly includes the children of bicultural parents. Many of us recognise ourselves there. The same research says belonging often comes from people with a similar background, which may be why meeting another luk khrueng can feel like skipping ten steps of explaining.

When a Thai relative asks, you can answer simply. This card says the fact:

โตเมืองนอก

toh mueang nork

โตเมืองนอกครับ

toh mueang nork khrap

โตเมืองนอกค่ะ

toh mueang nork kha

Who is speaking?

ครับ said by a manค่ะ said by a woman

Draft: waiting for a native speaker’s review.

How do people make peace with being from both?

Often not by picking a side. Psychologists Verónica Benet-Martínez and Jana Haritatos studied what they call bicultural identity integration: how far someone sees their two cultural identities as “compatible” or “oppositional”. They found it has two separate parts, how much the two cultures feel distant versus overlapping, and how much they feel in conflict versus in harmony. A 2008 follow-up by Chen, Benet-Martínez and Bond found that seeing your two identities as integrated predicted better psychological adjustment in most of the groups they studied.

In plain words: the people who feel the calmest about it are often the ones who stopped treating it as a contest. Both kitchens are yours. Both languages are yours, at whatever level they are today.

Maria P. P. Root, then an associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington, put it even more directly in her “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People”. Among the rights it lists: “not to justify my existence in this world”, “to identify myself different in different situations”, “to change my identity over my lifetime – and more than once”, and “to have loyalties and identify with more than one group of people”.

So you can be “the Thai one” at school and the one a stranger at the market calls ฝรั่ง (fa-rang), a Westerner. It can sting, and it’s usually curiosity, not unkindness. Both experiences are real. ลูกครึ่ง (luuk khrueng), literally “half child”, is the everyday word for you. The “half” describes your parents, not how much you belong, and plenty of us simply say we’re both. You can feel more Thai at 30 than you did at 15. Nobody gets to rank it. There’s no such thing as half the belonging. This line says it on your own terms:

โตเมืองนอกแต่ใจยังเป็นคนไทย

toh mueang nork tae jai yang pen khon thai

โตเมืองนอกแต่ใจยังเป็นคนไทยครับ

toh mueang nork tae jai yang pen khon thai khrap

โตเมืองนอกแต่ใจยังเป็นคนไทยค่ะ

toh mueang nork tae jai yang pen khon thai kha

Who is speaking?

ครับ said by a manค่ะ said by a woman

Draft: waiting for a native speaker’s review.

How can you keep the bridge open between trips?

The second life doesn’t have to switch off at the airport. A few small habits keep it warm:

• Pick up the video call. Yai mostly wants to see your face, and thirty seconds counts. Our guide to video calls with Yai has the lines.
• Keep the things you grew up with close. A film, a song, a snack from the trip. See what we grew up with for a shelf of shared nostalgia.
• Ask one real question per trip. Not “how are you”, but “what was Mum like at my age?” The deeper talk starts there.

That’s what the Visiting Thailand moment in Reply Thai is for: from the airport pickup to the goodbye before you fly home, practised as short replies so the first days feel less rusty and the last ones say what you mean.

Reply Thai for iPhoneComing soon

Thai words on this page are a draft until a native speaker has reviewed them.