Pieces of Purple: The Greatness, Grit, and Grace of Growing Up MK by Michèle Phoenix (2025)
I don’t usually bestow “Best of the Year” status in October, but I’m going out on a limb with this book. I’d be shocked if in the next 2 months I came across another book as pertinent and powerful as this one written by, for, and about Third Culture Kids.
Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve lived more than 1/4 of my life overseas. Or maybe it’s that my kids (ages 12 and 14) have lived as Third-Culture Kids (TCKs) since birth. Or maybe it’s even that our home is a mix of cultures, me being a Wisconsin-bred fella and my wife Chinese.
Whatever the reason, this book hit hard for me, touching on a dozen sore spots and providing several dozen more “Aha!” moments. I’ve already recommended Pieces of Purple as essential reading to several mission organizations that I know, and I agree 100% with the blurb on the front cover:
Pieces of Purple is the book TCK families have been waiting for. (Ruth E. Van Reken)
Note: this post includes Amazon affiliate links.
I will believe that I am not weird, but I am complex
(Michele Phoenix in Pieces of Purple, 153)
Who Is Michèle Phoenix
Michèle is herself a TCK with Canadian-American roots who grew up in France. Throughout this book, this teacher of TCK teens with 20+ years’ experience opens up about her own baggage and struggles as an MK, yet she does so from the stance of a mentor and counselor.
Nowhere in this book does Michèle convey her own openness or brokenness as a weakness, and it’s this personal warmth of honesty wrapped in professionalism that empowers this book. I’ve read other books on TCKs—most popularly Third Culture Kids mentioned above by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken (1999)—yet they seem to lack the heart and depth of Pieces of Purple. The closest books that come to the humanity of this book are missionary memoirs, yet those generally fail in the other direction, often lacking the depth of research and psychology.
Pieces of Purple is the happy, perfect medium.
All this praise might sound like either I’m friends with Michèle Phoenix—we’ve never met—or that I’m getting paid for her book sales or something. Apart from pennies from Amazon, I’m not! I’m just a dude raising TCK teens in a very TCK home who has finally found a book that articulates our struggles and gives us hope for the future—and all, thank God, from a Christian perspective.
I almost want to leave my review at that and let you go dig into it yourself. But there are a few points I’d like to share to ensure you know what you’re getting.
What Are “Pieces of Purple” or “Purple Kids”?
The purple concept in this book is simple. Whereas I’m a guy who took my Wisconsin culture (blue) and morphed it into a Chinese culture (red) when I moved overseas and married my beautiful wife, these colors are but beads in my jar—distinctly blue and distinctly red, jumbled and mixed, but still just a jar full of beads. (16-18)
TCKs on the other hand differ. Because they experience these two cultures from their blue dad and red mom, and because they have lived all over the US and in parts of China throughout their formative years, their “beads” never had time to set and harden. Instead, my kids experience these cultural peculiarities and shifts as droplets of clay, red and blue still, but clay that is soft and moldable until it forms, not a mixture of red and blue beads or swirls, but its own unique shade of purple.
As Michèle Phoenix describes it, these kids are like a “beautiful, complicated play dough.” (25)
What Struggles Might TCKs Face?
Phoenix deals with many potential pitfalls in this book, though I want to mention only three. These aren’t necessarily things my own kids struggle with yet, but they are troubles I’ve seen in others, which is why they stuck out to me.
Arrogance
It may seem strange that someone with unique problems would ever become arrogant about them, but it’s true. TCK’s have been so cultured from places most kids only dream about visiting that they can develop arrogance about all they know and have experienced as a world traveler.
Phoenix offers an interesting illustration for this problem of TCKs looking down on mono-culture people back home for not knowing some things about the world. She suggests it’s like looking down on a blind person for not knowing what the color “red” is (31-33). Teens can be mean, and sometimes well-cultured teens even more so, though they often don’t even recognize it.
The “Shoulds” of Missionary Culture
This topic from Chapter 4 is especially important, and it goes as much for PKs as it does MKs. There is often an unstated and understood level of behavior to which all ministers’ kids must attain—and then maintain. They should be saved. They should be spiritual kids who know their Bibles. They should respect their parents and exemplify Christ and love the locals.
Likewise, there are plenty of other should nots. They should not doubt their salvation. They should not doubt or fear or feel anxious (because God’s is in control of the good times and the bad). They should not be covetous or greedy or like rock music or Harry Potter.
The stress of expectations that our church cultures put upon missionaries and pastors trickles down to their immature, still growing, still changing, still unsure-of-themselves MKs and PKs. It’s a terrible burden to place on anyone, let alone young people who have no real “home” or sense of “belonging” (see Chapter 11).
Deconstruction
Chapter 9 introduces a popular yet sticky topic, and I felt Phoenix handled it with extra care—especially since she herself struggled with deconstruction for a time (109). Because the very term throws up red flags in many people’s minds, I really appreciated her spot-on definition of healthy deconstruction for MKs:
It means stripping down a passive, “inherited” faith to its biblical roots and theological core in a quest to understand what it was truly meant to be. (103)
Most important to this topic is the fault of Christians who fail to exemplify Christ in front of the kids for whom they are often the only example. When parents or teammates live two-faced lives in front of TCKs, they communicate through the unholy mixture of their sinful behaviors and sanctified speech a false view of God that may take decades for children to untangle. Some never do. Phoenix writes:
Perhaps the greatest motivator of deconstruction I’ve noticed among the teens and adults I work with is un-Christlike Christians, whose words and actions seem to contradict the basic tenets of what the Bible teaches. Anything done in God‘s name, they assume is done with God‘s approval or at his bequest. So if they’ve seen Christians behave hatefully – – or if they’ve experienced neglect or abandonment or abuse at the hands of people who serve God – – they’re likely to assume that he’s OK with it, if not actively motivating it. (105-106)
I tell you, this was a hard but necessary chapter to read. If you’re one automatically turned off by the very word “deconstruction,” I hear you. But I also encourage you to show some grace, to open your ears to people struggling with it—and to read this chapter!
Conclusion
I could go on and on, but I’ve got to stop somewhere. I urge you to get this book for your favorite missionary on the field. I urge you too to consider sharing it with your missions committee or those working with ESL programs, etc. in your church. It’s certain to open some eyes, and to rescue some TCKs from the misery of being misunderstood by those called to love them best.
Also included in this book are links to Phoenix’s website and study questions, making it ever a great table-read or small-group study guide. I can’t praise it enough. Get your copy today!
©2025 E.T.
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