Reverse Culture Shock - When Home Doesn't Feel Like Home
Reverse Culture Shock - When Home Doesn’t Feel Like Home
It’s A Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies. Jimmy Stewart’s character walks around his home town as if he had never been born. He knows everyone and everything about this place - but he really knows nothing. This is an accurate picture of what it is like to experience Reverse Culture Shock. We have returned home to a place that has been our home for 30 of our 34 years on this planet, and we are familiar with people and places - but everything has changed. We know what streets to take to get there but when we arrive we see that the kids have grown to the point that we don’t even recognize them. The building is the same on the outside but on the inside everything is just so...different.
We fully expect kids to grow up and of course the songs played on the radio will be new and fresh. Smartphones have changed everything about the way people live their lives. Twitter is changing (or better put - has changed) the way we communicate. It is not these things that make the re-entry into our own home land difficult, rather it is the things that haven’t changed and which we now see in a whole new light that make returning home so hard.
Many of these we have anticipated (see previous post entitled “Are You Glad to be Home?”), many have caught us by surprise. Some of these things we will just have to accept and get used to again, but some of the things that now bother me I hope I never accept, I hope they will always bother me.
So as not to be confusing you with vagueness, I will give you some specifics. The list will not be exhaustive but you will get the point.
1. Privacy - To put it bluntly Americans are private, closed off, untrusting, and paranoid. If you have a garage (which most Americans have) it is possible to go to work, return home, do your evening activities, go to bed, and repeat the next day without ever having seen or having been seen by your neighbors. We no longer build front porches, we build back porches. We do this because we don’t trust our neighbors. We don’t trust our neighbors because we don’t know our neighbors. We call this “personal space.”
In China, there is no personal space - there are just too many people. It’s not just about space. Our neighbors (in America they would be called “strangers”) were always talking to us, holding our baby, and offering our kids snacks. And you know what - our baby wasn’t kidnapped, our kids weren’t poisoned, and we even got to know a few people.
2. Road Rage - For the last 7 months I had my driver’s license in China. The rules in the book are almost exactly the same as they are in America but the rules of the road are completely different. Their disregard for the driving laws leads to inefficiency, awful traffic, and an abundance of accidents. However, one thing you will not see in China - road rage. Why? Because they realize they have no right to get mad at someone for cutting them off when they cut off someone else 30 seconds ago.
Apparently Americans are angry people. I have been shocked by the degree of anger I have seen from drivers who were just “wronged” by another driver, and it cost the offended driver a whopping 1.3 seconds of their time. I mean 1.3 seconds, that is definitely worth laying on the horn, getting red in the face, and risking a heart attack. Americans, you are entitled to that anger, you deserve it, it is your right because you live in a free country.
3. Freedom of the Press - Don’t misunderstand me here. Of all the freedoms that we have in America they all stem from free press. If you get rid of the freedom of the press, you might as well get rid of all of the others. However, the news (read: entertainment) industry is a culture shock in and of itself for someone who has forgotten how bad it really is. When news is not interesting or entertaining enough, the various outlets will manufacture their own “news.” And of course there is no regard for people in the constant and brutal reporting of entertainment. To the consumers of the industry that showed people jumping from the upper levels of the WTC towers on 9/11 (which they stopped very quickly), that showed footage of the luge crash which killed an olympian in Vancouver, and many other things that are not your business to see I ask, like Maximus in the Coliseum, “are you not entertained?”
4. Politics - I chose a bad time in the political calendar to re-enter America. The hate that I have seen from both sides in this political climate has made me long for my former country of residence where they don’t have 2 parties spewing hate at each other on a 24 hour news cycle. Ok, not really, but it has been a serious issue of culture shock to see these very fear and hate mongers talk about this the “greatest country in the world”
Comments?
It’s A Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies. Jimmy Stewart’s character walks around his home town as if he had never been born. He knows everyone and everything about this place - but he really knows nothing. This is an accurate picture of what it is like to experience Reverse Culture Shock. We have returned home to a place that has been our home for 30 of our 34 years on this planet, and we are familiar with people and places - but everything has changed. We know what streets to take to get there but when we arrive we see that the kids have grown to the point that we don’t even recognize them. The building is the same on the outside but on the inside everything is just so...different.
We fully expect kids to grow up and of course the songs played on the radio will be new and fresh. Smartphones have changed everything about the way people live their lives. Twitter is changing (or better put - has changed) the way we communicate. It is not these things that make the re-entry into our own home land difficult, rather it is the things that haven’t changed and which we now see in a whole new light that make returning home so hard.
Many of these we have anticipated (see previous post entitled “Are You Glad to be Home?”), many have caught us by surprise. Some of these things we will just have to accept and get used to again, but some of the things that now bother me I hope I never accept, I hope they will always bother me.
So as not to be confusing you with vagueness, I will give you some specifics. The list will not be exhaustive but you will get the point.
1. Privacy - To put it bluntly Americans are private, closed off, untrusting, and paranoid. If you have a garage (which most Americans have) it is possible to go to work, return home, do your evening activities, go to bed, and repeat the next day without ever having seen or having been seen by your neighbors. We no longer build front porches, we build back porches. We do this because we don’t trust our neighbors. We don’t trust our neighbors because we don’t know our neighbors. We call this “personal space.”
In China, there is no personal space - there are just too many people. It’s not just about space. Our neighbors (in America they would be called “strangers”) were always talking to us, holding our baby, and offering our kids snacks. And you know what - our baby wasn’t kidnapped, our kids weren’t poisoned, and we even got to know a few people.
2. Road Rage - For the last 7 months I had my driver’s license in China. The rules in the book are almost exactly the same as they are in America but the rules of the road are completely different. Their disregard for the driving laws leads to inefficiency, awful traffic, and an abundance of accidents. However, one thing you will not see in China - road rage. Why? Because they realize they have no right to get mad at someone for cutting them off when they cut off someone else 30 seconds ago.
Apparently Americans are angry people. I have been shocked by the degree of anger I have seen from drivers who were just “wronged” by another driver, and it cost the offended driver a whopping 1.3 seconds of their time. I mean 1.3 seconds, that is definitely worth laying on the horn, getting red in the face, and risking a heart attack. Americans, you are entitled to that anger, you deserve it, it is your right because you live in a free country.
3. Freedom of the Press - Don’t misunderstand me here. Of all the freedoms that we have in America they all stem from free press. If you get rid of the freedom of the press, you might as well get rid of all of the others. However, the news (read: entertainment) industry is a culture shock in and of itself for someone who has forgotten how bad it really is. When news is not interesting or entertaining enough, the various outlets will manufacture their own “news.” And of course there is no regard for people in the constant and brutal reporting of entertainment. To the consumers of the industry that showed people jumping from the upper levels of the WTC towers on 9/11 (which they stopped very quickly), that showed footage of the luge crash which killed an olympian in Vancouver, and many other things that are not your business to see I ask, like Maximus in the Coliseum, “are you not entertained?”
4. Politics - I chose a bad time in the political calendar to re-enter America. The hate that I have seen from both sides in this political climate has made me long for my former country of residence where they don’t have 2 parties spewing hate at each other on a 24 hour news cycle. Ok, not really, but it has been a serious issue of culture shock to see these very fear and hate mongers talk about this the “greatest country in the world”
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