Culture Shock
“Who are YOU?” Said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” Said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”
“I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir” said Alice, “because I'm not myself, you see.” –Lewis Carroll
“Voce quer fruitas?” The wrinkled hand of the elderly woman held a pineapple towards me. I smiled and moved on quickly, as unsure of what I wanted as I was of what she had said. “Smile and nod” I thought to myself, “smile and nod.” Finding yourself in a new place can be scary. The anxiety and feelings that you encounter has been labeled “Culture shock,” with three phases: honeymoon, negotiation, and adjustment.
Sitting on the cool tile floor eating fresh pineapple, I waved my hands energetically and sprayed pineapple juice on Emanuel: “I just cannot get over the beauty. I can’t get over the feeling that each day is an adventure because I have no clue what is going on. I have this idea that I will learn something new every minute if only my brain could contain it.”
The honeymoon stage is everything from pre-experience excitement to delight with novelty. Differences are seen in a romantic light, exotic and fascinating.“You speake Engliss?” asked a dark, curly haired stranger as he leaned in to kiss me on my left cheek and then my right. “Y-yes” I replied shyly, unsure of what was culturally correct to do next. Some friends I made in Brazil asked me to teach them English. My credentials? I was a native speaker. Thirty people showed up, most of whom I had never seen before. I cleared my throat, pulled my sweaty palms out of my pockets, and began: “My name is Rachel, what is your name?”
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” –Dorothy, Wizard of Oz
I sighed, and waited. What could I do? The only one home was the maid, who didn’t speak English. I rested against the tile wall and tried to figure out the best solution. There was no toilet paper, I didn’t know the word for “Toilet paper” in Portuguese, and I needed toilet paper. I could try yelling “papel of toilet!” and hope the maid would get the idea.
In the negotiation stage, things that used to be beautiful are now irritating. All you want is (fill in the blank), and it always stays just out of reach. This stage can have mood swings and can lead to depression or withdrawal from the new culture. The Brazilian wind whipped through my hair as I held down the paper and wrote quickly, “I am so far away from American culture and thinking, surrounded by different everything—it makes me wonder who I am. I have no expectations to live up to. No one here knows who I am, what I stand for, and what I believe. It is like a blank piece of paper, and I have no idea what I want to write on it.”
But I adjusted. “What was it like?” Emanuel asked, as we dug into the meat filled pancakes. “It was hard because coming here I was the extra person added to the mix, instead of making up part of the mix. I had to learn to be like icing on the cake: the icing has to form to the mold of the cake, trying to fill in the cracks and help out where it can.”
By the time of adjustment, you have developed new routines, and things, in a different sense, feel “normal.” You begin to either understand the new culture, or understand that you don’t understand it yet, and that is okay.
“Not all who wander are lost” J. R. R. Tolkien
“It is so weird, Emanuel—it is like nothing is real. Being back, my thoughts flake off and float down to the floor. What is mine? What is me? I am stumbling through life. Not half bad, but not all there. And no one else knows me well enough to know I am not here. Not here really. I am living outside myself.”
Emanuel finished his shake and nodded, understandingly. The same three stages can be seen in returning home after being gone. In some, it is noticed even stronger than while in another country. Reverse culture shock is worse for many people because they are not expecting it. They expect things to be different in a new place, but not where they grew up. All your old “normals” feel strange.
Emanuel stops as I unlock my car door. “Brazilians have a word for it that you do not: “Saudades.” You can’t explain it—you have to feel it. It is the longing, melancholy feeling that never fully leaves you, even when you are happy. You feel saudades when you want to be with the ones you love, but you can’t. It is when you long for something that is out of your hands, out of your control. This word, saudades, is what you have carried with you back to America.”
I stare down the row of soy sauces at Kroger, the glass bottles blurring and my head pounding. I sink down to the dingy linoleum floor and rest my back against the aisle of cereal boxes. “Just pick up some soy sauce. Just pick it up and go.” My brain tells me, but my body refuses to comply. So many choices and so much stuff. I miss the feira in Brazil with fresh fruit and vegetables. I miss the two aisles that make up the entire grocery store in the rural town. I am overloaded with everything around me, all the advertisements competing for my attention. “It isn’t fair. It is not right.” I complain to my mom as I hand her the soy sauce. “We have so much, and we don’t even know it.” It is like the opposite of the honeymoon phase for me.
“I went a little farther,” he said. “Then still a little farther—till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back.” –Paul Scott
It is often hard to remember that things have changed while you have been away, or that your ideal of home (while gone) is not reality. Many times people don’t want to hear about your trip—and even if they do, they just don’t seem to “get it.” This can lead to the same kind of frustration as you had in the original negotiation stage. “I returned and felt like everything had changed.” I share with Emanuel. “Before my friends and I were all triangles. While there, I became a square—with even more angles—while my friends were all rounded off into circles. Now I am constantly bumping corners.”
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” –G.K. Chesterton
I pause as I put on my coat to go to the art museum, and turn Emanuel reflectively, “There are some things that I can only learn in Brazil, and others I can only learn in America.” Having spent a lot of past 17 years in Brazil, adjusting back and forth, I can now talk with Emanuel in Portuguese—but we always return to English.
“When are you coming back to Brazil?” Emanuel asks me. “I am not sure yet,” I tell him truthfully, “But I will go back. I have been through so many times of going back and forth between countries that I feel blurred sometimes, but I would not change anything. I have become my own person, a blend of two lives in two countries. Brazil and America make up who I am and are a part of me, but I am still a whole me on my own. It has taken a long time to be able to say that.”
“And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” –T.S. Eliot
