For me it was sexuality in the media. The last time I went back to the US (years and years ago) from China I was so disturbed by how over-sexualized everything on TV and on the radio was. I was in a car one morning and the driver turned on Howard Stern’s show and I was just totally shocked at how crass it was. I listened to his show while growing up, I’d seen his movie, I watched his TV show on E most nights and never really thought anything of his content, but after some time in China, where sexualized media is pretty rare (and pretty tame in those rare cases), I was just completely befuddled about everything I heard on his show that morning. And then it seemed to be like everywhere I looked there was some sexual ad, some crude sex joke, some innuendo used to sell something. I never thought anything of it before since, like every other American kid, It was just normal to me. Once I started living in a culture where that wasn’t the norm, however, I started to see how saturated everything in America is in sex. I flew back to China early and haven’t been back to the US since.
I can’t say I’ve ever felt culture shock on return visits to the US, and I tend to go five years or more between visits. In fact, it’s been exactly five years since my last one. Maybe limiting myself these days pretty much to Hawaii helps?
I’ve always thought “culture shock” to be a much overused concept anyway. Maybe I’m just used to living over here, but I don’t recall being very fazed when I first arrived either. The live sex shows were a revelation, though!
I’ve had difficulty with re-entry when I’ve been away for longer periods of time; but also after some shorter trips.
The most memorable of the latter events was in the early '80s after spending a couple of weeks in East Germany. I attended a course in Dresden and went on a couple of field trips to nearby sights (Meissen, Sächsische Schweiz, other places I’ve forgotten).
When I got back to West Berlin, I felt overwhelmed by all the advertising and noise. It took me days to get used to all the visual and auditory clutter. I remember being particularly annoyed by billboards. (Maybe because of my longtime fondness for Ogden Nash - “I think that I shall never see, a billboard lovely as a tree…”)
In the meantime, my re-entry shock has been replaced with low-grade permanent homesickness. When I’m not in Mexico, I want to see jacarandas and bougainvilleas blooming and eat real tamales or any of a long list of tropical fruit. When I’m not in Germany, I want to eat quark and Laugenwecken and Brie with green peppercorns. When I’m in Germany, I want to eat real Mexican food. Just a few examples.
Interesting. I think males and females experience this aspect of China differently.
Myself, I feel much more sexualized here. Wearing jeans and a tee shirt feels subversive here, since most women present themselves in a very sexualized way. Booty shorts, fishnets and knee-high stiletto boots is the uniform for middle aged women doing the family grocery shopping- never mind what younger single girls present. Prostitution seems open and accepted, and indeed most forms of nightlife eventually end up being about prostitution. It seems like simple male-female friendships without sexual overtones is unheard of. Every interaction I have with men here seems to ultimately have sex at the bottom of it. Even run of the mill night clubs have strippers and the common “man lifts something with his penis” show. Aphrodisiacs are on sale EVERYWHERE. I feel like I’m always being defined as a sexual object and rarely as the person I am, especially around men.
Myself, I’ve gone through all the classic signs of culture shock, as do most of the Peace Corps Volunteers I know. They give us a handout during Peace Corps training that goes through the mental processes month-by-month through the two years. To my (and everyone else’s) surprise, it was shockingly accurate.
Do you ever get tired of the Chinese insisting that it the West that is obsessed with sex and not the Chinese ? I would not even know where to find a prostitute in my hometown in the West, but here in China it seems as though there are prostitutes everywhere.
The short skirts and F-me boots worn by Chinese women do not bother me, but they refuse to believe me when I tell them that Western women typically do not dress like that.
simple homer - are you at a university? I know that Even Sven is. Seems like y’all are hanging with a younger crowd than I am. I work in a happening young area of Shanghai (Xujiahui), and while there are some smoking hot babes in minimal clothes at times, it sure is not the norm or pervasive. And that’s not generally how women in my company, a Global 50, dress. Even our skanky, new gigilo every week branch manager, didn’t dress that way.
The prostitution is definately pervasive. Most bars have “bar girls” of some sort. Whorehouses masquerading as barber shops or massage places are everywhere. Definately the obvious whorehouses are a lot more open out in the Shanghai suburbs than they are in the city center.
I haven’t seen the “man lifts something with his penis show” ever. I must run with the wrong crowd.
It’s wierd, I experienced China when there was no prostitution and you couldn’t date the women (they would go to jail) and watched it move to where it is now. But where China is now I would rate on the tame side compared with Japan. And certainly not wild compared with a University party town in the US. Would you disagree?
I think it’s the whole puritan Scarlet Letter thing, where sex is so hush hush that it becomes an obsessions.
I think the best example is strip shows. My small town has strip shows occasionally, and they are highly illegal. They are advertised in covert ways, through car-mounted billboards that drive furtively though town. In order to go to one you have to contact this really bad mafia guy named “Turtle”, who, I swear to god, arranges for someone to drive you blindfolded to the location. Everyone involved is on edge, and when my friends went to one it shut down immediately because someone brought out a cell phone camera.
And yet there are seedy brothels filled with bored looking girls bathed in pink fluorescent lights operating openly, everywhere. Having a good time looking at a girl is not okay, but furtively screwing one in a place where you have to pay extra to use a bed (really!) is apparently fine.
From my perspective, it almost seems like sexuality is okay as long as everyone is as miserable as possible about it.
I dunno. I’ll admit that I don’t understand sexuality in China at all, just that I personally feel a lot of uncomfortable sexual tensions and have been in lots of uncomfortable sexual situations than I remember having in the States. I never had to listen to my colleagues brag about what class of prostitutes they frequent in America! And yeah, simple homer, I laughed my ass off when one of my students told me that marital infidelity is a Western invention that didn’t exist in China until the 1990’s. Ha!
I think it’s interesting that some people coming back to the states from Japan find it louder here. That was one thing I never got used to over there (4 years)–nearly constant, annoying, conflicting background noise. Our neighborhood had loudspeaker announcements every few hours (including the early morning wake-up call), the garbage trucks played Christmas carols, election season brought minivans with loudspeakers blaring at incredible decibels driving around the neighborhood, frequently parking at our corner for an hour or more at a time (when this happened I just had to leave the house and go elsewhere, I couldn’t take the noise). Everywhere we went, tv shows like this were on. The grocery stores had multiple loud, conflicting jingles on 10 second loops from several sources. One store in our area, a novelty store, must have had at least 50 speakers each playing a different high-pitched sound/song. The level of noise pollution was incredible. I find it much quieter in the States–I do live in the country, but I lived a bit out in the sticks there, too.
Going to Japan, I think the biggest shock for us was that no one took Visa/MC, including the ATMs. We went to the biggest city in Okinawa our first day there, assuming we could get cash in town, it took us hours to get some money, and we were very hungry before we found a hotel restaurant that took Visa. (If you’re ever in a similar situation, try to find a post office ATM–they take american cards.) Also, just the cash culture–when we rented our apartment, we had to bring something like $6K in cash to the housing agency.
So far I haven’t been too shocked coming back–it’s been very nice being able to speak to and understand everyone around me.
No - thank you Christianity.
Yeah, the concept of noise pollution has yet to break through over here. I’d heard about the early morning wake up alarm for towns but didn’t actually experience it until I spent the weekend at Shiga some 10 years ago. My God. A 6 am wake up call on a neighbourhood-wide PA system? :eek:
Jesus! What parts of China do you guys live in?! Can’t say that anything like that happens up here, AFAIK. There are prostitutes around and they’re fairly easy to spot, I’ve been to bars where clothed girls dance on the tables, but can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone wearing revealing clothing when out doing errands or anything like that. Certainly NEVER have seen any bar show where a guy lifts anything with his package (there are some shows with dancing girls, but they don’t involve nudity and are actually pretty classy and well-choreographed). even sven maybe your experience just has to do with you running in a “sleazy” circle, as you said in another post?
ETA: I think my post was referring more to media sexualization rather than the actual atmosphere of the place one lives in.
Missed the window:
Heh. Shoulda asked him how many wives Mao Zedong had.
What does Christianity have to do with Chinese sexual expression?
Ah, whoops - I thought even sven was referring to a home town in the US, rather than the one she currently lives in in China. So it doesn’t have anything to do with it.
But my point stands in terms of what she says about scarlett letters. In the west we still have lingering issues with regard to sexuality that are pretty much wholley as a result of judeo-christian doctrine on sin and sexual repression. I’m not aware of pre-Christian civilisations being so hung up on the subject (although of course that isn’t to say they were all free loving types, I think that was mainly the Romans…).