Content Note: Racism
Seven of Nine is a third-culture kid.
Those of us who leave one country for another at an early age recognize the beats: You’re one person, a whole, unconflicted person with a whole, unconflicted family that belongs—until being literally assimilated as a child. You learn to adjust, but eventually—perhaps as a child, perhaps as an adult—you’re no longer a single identity. You fracture into multiple identities and no longer fit anywhere—not the Federation, not the Borg, not Singapore, not the US.
This fracturing brings gifts. It makes you aware of how much you can choose—you see defaults and structures in a way few others do. You watch for cues, automatically adapt to new situations.
But it’s also trauma that you don’t fully recognize for decades.
Seven’s story is one of violence and trauma.
The Borg assimilate her. At just six years old, they remap her synaptic pathways, strip away her individuality and pieces of her human physiology. They turn her into one of them. She aids in the assimilation of millions of beings, entire species. She is part of the Collective.
And then Captain Janeway forcibly de-assimilates her—a project Seven herself does not consent to, a project Janeway knows full well that she would never consent to. In fact, Seven initially begs to be returned to the Collective, begs not to be turned into a human. But Janeway and the Doctor strip away her Borg parts—or as much as they can, because it turns out she can’t live without her cybernetic implants. They’ve been a part of her for so long that removing them would kill her.
Janeway and the Doctor push her to meet their expectations of “human”—dating, emotion, a human name—expectations that Seven herself often rejects, especially at first. In Star Trek: Voyager, she likes most of the Borg parts of herself; she has little patience for the humanizing projects Janeway and the Doctor thrust upon her. But she’s forced to assimilate back into humanity. Even though she can never be completely human again.
And yet: Before the end of Voyager, years later, she would no longer choose to go back to the Collective. For all the trauma, for all that she didn’t have a choice—she wouldn’t be herself if she’d never been Borg, and if afterward she hadn’t become (partially, mostly) human again.
Perhaps it’s all the agency that was taken away from Seven that makes her take on so much agency after.
Independence is a trauma response. She’s independent because she can only rely on herself.
In the US, we sell the story of the American Dream. We rarely tell the story of the cost.
I was born in Singapore, a city-state the size of New York City with two-thirds the people. While it recognizes four national languages, 80 percent of the population is ethnically Chinese. My family left when I was five.
Moving to the US broke the long chain of cousins, severing the older generation (those we knew) from the younger (those who were born after we’d left). My brother and I were the link between both sets in terms of age. My mother is the seventh of ten siblings; her family is close. But when we moved, phone calls were expensive and email didn’t functionally exist. Thus “family” is an abstraction I tend to forget exists, even though they were always welcoming and generous when I’d see them. (Truly, some of my aunties, uncles, and cousins go above and beyond.) But we couldn’t afford to fly back very often—plane tickets were expensive too—and I saw most of my relatives every five years or so. When I do think about them, I think of many of my relatives fondly, but we never developed real ease with each other; we don’t understand each other’s worlds.
As an adult on a globe that’s now easily connected, I feel too awkward to reach out—and I recognize this awkwardness is fully on my end rather than theirs. It leaves me wistful for an idea of family, a fantasy reality from Hollywood films. But when I’m in Singapore, I’m keenly aware of how I don’t belong—in a way that’s more present, more tangible, than the usual ways I know I don’t belong in the US. Being in Asia brings up a jumble of otherness, perhaps because they expect me to be one of them—I look like them on the outside, after all—when the truth is that my values, language, and culture are half the world apart. So much culture is foreign to me—for example, I didn’t grow up with Chinese festivals and had to learn about them (mostly from books and the internet) as an adult. To be completely honest: I still mix them up.
My parents had a strong community in Singapore. It was so strong that after my father died, my mother reconnected and was able to revive friendships that had been largely dormant for thirty years. They never managed to build the same depth of community in the US. Growing up felt like being part of an isolated unit, compounded by parents who—like most immigrant parents—did not fully understand the culture and norms of their new home.
There’s a kind of violence that comes with moving countries—so much in your world shifts, so much feels unreliable. I became independent because I didn’t feel like I had anyone I could ask for help.
I often wonder what life would have been like for alternate-universe me, the me that never left.
My relatives assume the world will reward them based on merit and largely, it does—they work hard, and there is no “bamboo ceiling” preventing my cousins from reaching top leadership positions in their workplaces. Before the Asian financial crisis, my grandfather was a member of multiple private clubs—he used to call it “buying prestige.” My father graduated from Anglo-Chinese School, where the author of Crazy Rich Asians studied. Its alumni include members of Parliament, deputy prime ministers, and a former president.
But I moved.
I grew up half a planet away from prestige and private clubs. I grew up in Redford, Michigan, a blue-collar township whose motto (at last check) was “Gateway to the Suburbs.” Go a mile east, and you would find yourself in Detroit. Go a mile west, and you would find yourself in Livonia, a former sundown town. My father believed in assimilation, in fully integrating yourself into the US; he wanted to be American, and deliberately avoided groups of Singaporeans. So we moved to a place where the only Asians were us and one other family. Most of my classmates were white, and many of their parents were auto workers who’d grown up in the same town.
In elementary school, bullies and popular kids pulled their eyes back into slits, making “Chinese” noises—they’d ask if the chicken I was eating for lunch was actually dog. I was obviously foreign. Not one of them. It was written all over my face, in my eyes. While I wasn’t a great athlete, I wasn’t a terrible one—but I was always picked second to last in gym, last before the biggest bully in our class. This gave me an idea of my social standing.
Where in Singapore we had connections and financial resources, in the US, my parents didn’t make much money—a portion of my (in-state) college tuition was covered by a need-based grant.
What if. What if I’d gone to school where others looked like me, where I was closer to people’s expectations of a so-called “default” human. What if I’d grown up in the house we had in Singapore, a house with a yard that grew papayas, a house that’s still an expensive rarity in a country filled with high-rise apartments.
What if I’d grown up with privilege.
And yet: The parallel-universe me that grew up in Singapore, that experienced privilege and never moved to the US—she wouldn’t be me. I don’t know who she’d be. Happier, perhaps. More successful, probably. But she would be a different person entirely.
You can’t take Seven’s cybernetic implants or nanoprobes away. They’re hard-wired into her body, a part of her. They repair her cells, enhance her vision. They’re a strength.
But the implants are what cause others to fear her, to distrust her—they’re a visible sign of her difference, a reminder that she’s an xB. An ex-Borg, not entirely human. She’s perhaps too Borg for Starfleet, which initially rejected her, and definitely too Borg for the commanding officer who refuses to address her by the name she prefers, calling her by her birth/human name “Hansen” instead. She was—and in many ways still is, in her very nature—a part of one of the most terrifying species in the galaxy. She wonders what if. What if she didn’t have implants. What if she’d never been assimilated. What if she’d been simply human, not human-and.
And then one day she wakes up in an alternate reality, one where she had never been assimilated. She’s still herself, but suddenly people laugh at her jokes. She’s immediately likeable, popular. People want to be around her. Interacting with others becomes easy.
Setting the universe right brings her implants, her Borg-ness back. Her loss is palpable.
A key piece of the third-culture experience is a constant tension. Your internal self doesn’t match your external self. Your entire conception of self changes depending on the country, on the people, on the context. You’re adept at code-switching, but also spend years trying to figure out who you are. But simultaneously, you do know yourself, because internally, you know exactly which ways you could and do stick out regardless of how much you manage to externally blend. Constantly questioning your identity forces you to decide who you are, why you are; you take nothing for granted.
I fact-check when I talk about Singapore. I’m unclear what oddities are unique to my family vs. what oddities are unique to the entire country. I get imposter syndrome talking about culture, history, even my own personal experience. This is what it means to be of a place and yet not of a place. You question your own life story constantly.
I felt Singaporean when I was traveling in Europe with my high school band. We’d fundraised for months, and there we were in Luxembourg, a few dozen American kids playing music in a town square. After the performance, our hosts were excited to feast us with a special treat: They proudly paraded a pig’s head on a platter. Most of the students were horrified and barely touched the roast pork they were served after. I ate the meal happily—in Singapore it’s common to serve an entire pig, head and all.
I felt American when I was in Singapore, a teenager trying on my first cheongsam, the iconic Chinese sheath dress. When I looked in the mirror I was shocked. “I look Chinese.”
My mother raised an eyebrow. “You are Chinese.”
Seven knows herself and her capabilities; she’s a force. While she would have never chosen assimilation and de-assimilation, her two halves bring unique gifts and perspectives. And Seven uses them.
She figures out a way to use her Borg nanoprobes to revive Neelix after he dies, bringing him back from the dead. She develops Borg-based technology for the Federation. She saves Voyager when she’s not seduced by the illusion of a wormhole back to the Alpha Quadrant, where she has good reason to be hesitant to go.
For a moment, in order to save others, she becomes the Borg Queen—but crucially, she’s also strong enough to return to herself when she chooses. She’s fought to gain a sense of self, and at least on that Cube, even the Borg couldn’t take it away.
Strength. The necessity of forging your own narrative, of deciding who you will be, of reconciling all of your shifting identities and parts. Resilience. Using all the gifts that have been granted to you as a child of multiple worlds.
That too is part of being a third-culture kid.
© 2024 Dawn Xiana Moon
