A friend from work has a sister who has lived long-term in Japan (about ten years) and is now visiting here in the USA because she’s decided to get her MBA. She plans to stay and work for two years and will then decide what to do beyond that. She’s surprised about the disconnect between how she remembers life in the USA and how it really is. It got me thinking how weird it would seem to be born here, but feel culture shock when you return to your old stomping grounds.
Has anybody else experienced culture shock? What do you do to lessen the effects? I’ve never lived abroad but I would imagine that learning a new language wouldn’t be the only challenge.
The shock you feel when returning to your native culture is called “Reverse Culture Shock” or “Re-entry shock” BTW. It’s in its own category, and some people find it harder to deal with than the basic kind of culture shock you experience when living constantly in a foreign culture.
I went through reverse culture shock when I got back to the US after having been in the Peace Corps. It’s hard to pin down exactly what happened, although I can say that things I knew about kept startling me.
Everything seemed really, really expensive.
It took me about six months to stop shaking my head the Bulgarian way. I still - nearly two years on - randomly drop Bulgarian into my speech. (If I drop something, there’s about a 95% chance I’ll say “opa!” and if you say my name to get my attention, there’s about a 50% chance I’ll respond with “da?”)
I don’t know. I think a lot of the weirdness wasn’t so much about going from one country to another as it was in going from a town of 3,000 to a city of 140,000. Ann Arbor isn’t exactly a booming metropolis, but it’s much bigger than my village in Bulgaria.
Most of my life has been dealing with culture shock - when I was 13 my parents decided to move back to Korea (“back” for them, but a first for me) and it took me several years to adjust to life here. Especially the school culture - imagine a kid educated in the States going to a place with uniforms and corporal punishment. I don’t think I ever fully adjusted, although I was somewhat settled in by the time I reached high school.
Then for grad school I went back to the US, first time in 11 years. I was so looking forward to returning to the place I considered home, but when I arrived everything seemed weird and foreign to me. Little things, like when you’re at the cash register at the drug store you are expected to take the items out of your shopping basket yourself (in Korea the person does it for you) really disoriented me. But I adjusted pretty quickly, although other things still weirded me out (like strangers striking up a conversation at the bus stop). Getting used to being at school again was another culture shock in itself.
THEN I came back to Korea again after a couple years in the US, and I had to get used to the chaos of Seoul all over again. It’s been two years since I’ve come back to Korea, and I’m pretty sure after another year or so my life is going to be uprooted once more. Not that I necessarily mind, but at some point in my life I would like a wee bit more stability.
I think adjusting gets easier the more you have to do it, relatively speaking. The longest I’ve ever lived in the same neighborhood is 5 years. Moving around has become more or less the norm for me at this point.
When I returned from two years in a west African village, I went through a pretty funny case of reverse culture shock.
Entering the Swiss airport on my way home was like a dream- I could barely make sense of how big and magnificent the building was.
Cameroonians create very little garbage and re-use literally everything except holey flip-flops, torn plastic bags and burnt-out cooking pots (these are the only items you will find in a Cameroonian garbage dump.) When I first got to the Swiss airport, I bought a bottle of orange juice. I couldn’t find a recycling bin, and I COULD NOT throw it away. I was confused and didn’t know quite what to do, so I walked around with that bottle for the better part of an hour! For months after returning, I tried to think of ways to use the huge amounts of garbage we produce- I remember one day polishing my shoes with a banana peel! The sheer abundance and waste was overwhelming.
In the American airport, the first thing I got was a slice of pizza. It was so disgusting rich that I could only eat half of it. And the guy at the counter really freaked me out. He smiled a lot and kept asking stuff like "Is there anything else I can get you?’ Being unaccustomed to customer service, I couldn’t figure out if I somehow knew him or if he was hitting on me or what!
Menus and supermarkets were tough. I couldn’t make sense of all the choices and would get a bit frazzled. The fluorescent lights were overwhelming. Air conditioning was also a little tough- it felt unnatural and extremely cold.
Clothing-wise, it took me more than a year to shake the feeling that showing your knees is obscene. And when I packed for my trip to China, I packed a number of prayer scarves. You know, because everyone needs prayer scarves!
It was also hard to make sense of being around non-African black people. I didn’t quite know how to make sense of that. Meanwhile, the little part of your head that goes “OMG white guy!” whenever you see a white guy in Africa just kept going off all the time!
I’ve got two more months left in China. I’m a bit more in-touch here, but I imagine when I return to America for good, I’m going to be really confused for a while!
I didn’t experience culture shock when I moved to Japan the first time, but had severe reverse culture shock when I moved back to the US three years later. The situation was aggravated in my case because while I was living in Japan my parents had moved from Boston to Seattle, so I was “returning” to a place I’d never been to before, with only a very limited support network.
My situation was made much better when I entered graduate school two months later and was able to integrate myself into that environment.
I remember my first shock when I was back in the US again was how f-ing loud everybody was.
I moved from Chicago to Singapore with my brand-new husband at age 24. We arrived in the middle of the night, so we didn’t see much on the way to the hotel. Waking up in the morning to the sound of completely foreign birds was a strange, strange experience. In general, Singapore is a pretty easy place to live as a foreigner. The biggest moment of culture shock came at the end of a long day of apartment hunting, when I was completely worn out from all of the overwhelming newness. I needed something familiar, so I went to McDonald’s and - without looking at the menu - ordered fries and a Diet Coke. The woman running the cash register told me that they didn’t have Diet Coke, and I just didn’t know how to react to that. It just didn’t compute for me. I was in McDonald’s, but they didn’t have Diet Coke! Such a strange feeling.
Upon returning to the States, I was really struck by (and annoyed by) how big everything is (especially restaurant portions) and how little walking anyone does.
As Canadians who frequently road trip to the US, it feels like coming back to peace and quiet when we come home (to our city of over a million people). I feel like my nerves are jangling the whole time we’re around US American cities - tvs on in the breakfast room at the hotel, huge billboards screaming for our attention everywhere, just so much stimulation.
I had reverse culture shock when I came to America after two months in India. The strongest thing was how skimpily the women dressed here. After two months of covering my legs and at least the upper part of my arms all the time, it was weird to see women in short shorts.
I returned to the U.S. after having lived in Spain for a year.
Probably the first thing I thought was, “Damn, Americans are FAT!” After spending a year around svelte Europeans, it was hard not to stare at the all the mountainous people stomping around.
It took me a while to re-adjust to American English, especially on T.V. All the announcers on T.V. sounded like they were speaking with a ridiculous cowboy drawl.
I had to learn to stop hissing at people. Spaniards hiss to gain people’s attention, and they also hiss to say “yes” (like an abbreviated “si”).
It took me years to come to terms with the fact that I could actually leave the house on a Sunday. In Spain, everything (everything!) closes on a Sunday. You can’t even buy an aspirin. Back in America, I would plan to have everything I needed in the house by Saturday, because in the back of my mind I still believed I couldn’t shop on a Sunday.
And the winner is: siesta! Yes, siesta, the greatest Spanish invention of all time. I believe a period of rest after lunch is the natural state of humankind, and it’s just downright cruel that in America we have to get right back to work. Every Saturday and Sunday and any other day possible I take a siesta. I refuse to give up this aspect of Spanish culture.
When I moved to Ecuador, the adaptation was surprisingly easy - you expect some things to be odd, because it’s a different place, after all. No one told me about the problems involved in coming back to the UK and I was surprised by many of the things in the article Hello Again linked. Mostly little things like everyone around me spoke English. The automatic shock of recognition you get when you’ve been abroad a while and hear someone speaking English is overwhelming when everyone around you does - and that lasted a few days, at least. (Still happens, actually, for the first day or so when I go back now.)
ETA - opening on Sundays! So true. Whenever I go back to the UK, I’m stunned by the idea that things are open all the time. On Sundays, and Mondays and Wednesdays. And they don’t take a 3 hour lunch break. (My little village enjoys its work/life balance. I never know when anything is going to be open, and food shopping is hit and miss…)
Finding things to do to integrate and build a new life for yourself helps a lot. Knowing the shock is coming helps, too - if you can get rid of your expectations of how things “ought” to be, you’ll find it easier to adjust to how things actually are. This is harder when you’re moving back to somewhere, rather than moving somewhere new. Not completely losing contact with your old life in the old place will make it easier - knowing someone else who has the same expectations of what “normal” is and being able to talk to them about the differences is helpful. (Most people aren’t very good at sympathising for very long when you tell them how weird the way they’ve always done things is…)
This isn’t about me leaving the country and coming back, but I was just thinking of this.
When I was a kid, I used to watch the Jetsons, Star Trek, and other futuristic shows. At the dinner table we talked about one futuristic thing, video phones. We talked about how cool it would be if those were really real. My mother disagreed. She said she’s hate them because what if someone called and she was in curlers and a bath robe. She’d hate to have to dress up just to answer the phone.
That conversation always stuck with me.
So a couple of weeks ago I was expecting a business call on Skype, the first time I’ve ever used it. The woman calling me called me 15 minutes ahead of our scheduled time, from her cell phone. She wanted to know if she could move our call back by 10 minutes, so that she could do her hair. My first thought was to tell her not to worry about it.
Then I realized that it would give me more time to find a better shirt.
Even relocating within the U.S. can be a problem. I was born and raised here in the Cleveland area, then went to college out of town, then lived in NYC for 25 years. When I returned here the first thing that struck me was how spread out everything is, compared with New York. You have to get in the car and drive everywhere; nothing is within walking distance.
And then there’s the whole “marry/merry/Mary” thing and “soda” vs. “pop.” And the worst adjustment: I had to stop being a Yankees fan.
Moving from Ct to NH was a shock. I actually went from the city to a town where you can walk to everything but not feel you are in a city. I also don’t feel fear all the time like when I was in New Haven. There is a freedom in having peace and safety.
Many, many years ago on my return to the U.K. after spending some time in Germany, I got on a bus to the Council estate (at 10.30 p.m.) where my mum lived, and was surprised to find it jam packed.
Where are all these people going I thought, because there was nothing of interest on the housing estate where the bus was going .
After a moments adjustment I realised that they were all going home after a night out, whereas in Germany we would just be setting off for a night out at that time.
(For anyone one who’s going to visit Britain, don’t worry its a lot livelier nowdays)
- I think that really illustrates what this thread is about.