There are Third Culture Kids (TCKs) today who have made it big in the music industry, and three of those musicians are Wiz Khalifa, Cristina Aguilera and Jason Wade from Lifehouse.
Wiz Khalifa
A U.S. rapper born in 1987 with both parents in the U.S. military. By age 15, he had lived in four countries: the United States, Germany, Japan and the UK.
Constantly faced with new schools and friends, he was very sociable, but found it hard to attach to those outside his family. Still, “his nomadic life broadened his mind and offered him many experiences from which to draw inspiration.”
Christina Aguilera
A U.S. pop singer born in 1980, Aguilera is the daughter of an Ecuadorian father and U.S. mother. By the time she was six years old, she lived in Texas and New Jersey and spent three years in Japan because of her father’s career in the U.S. Army.
When her parents split, she moved with her mom to Pennsylvania and started performing soon after. At 15 years old, she moved back to Japan to record her first hit with a Japanese pop star.
Jason Wade
A U.S. lead singer for the band “Lifehouse,” Wade was born in 1989 in the United States. He spent four years abroad with missionary parents traveling through Japan, Singapore, and Thailand before settling in Hong Kong where he attended an international school.
Wade lived in a small village where he did not fit in and he and his family returned to the United States after three years. At 12 years old, his parents divorced and he moved to Seattle, Wash., USA.
Then at 15 years old, he went to Los Angeles, Calif. where he started Lifehouse with fellow missionary kid, Sergio Andrade and two other friends.
