I don’t think culture shock is what most people think it is. Culture shock seems as though it should be that feeling you get when you walk through a foreign food court and see creatures with tentacles on sticks, or the sight of elderly men carrying impossibly heavy baskets of fruit on their backs to sell on the streets. But that is not culture shock, that’s just different.
I was asked whether I felt culture shock by friends and family shortly after my arrival in Chongqing. It was a difficult question to answer. Yes, it felt different. People behaved differently, the way people went about their day was different and people spoke in a language I didn’t understand. It felt different, but a country on the other side of the planet, with thousands of years of history, free of European influence, should of course feel different right?
The answer was remarked upon by others around me. No, culture shock is not the feeling of alienation after stepping off the plane, or even the weeks after it. Just wait, they said.
Conversely, during that time I felt more of a culture familiarity. I felt that the differences between myself and the people I’d met in this country were tiny. I quickly felt welcomed and warmed by all the people I interacted with. People live life in similar rhythms in most cities. They have jobs, commute, eat in restaurants, drink in bars, go to cinemas, shop in malls and play sports. Despite some contextual shifts like eating bowls of pig intestine noodles instead of chips, things didn’t feel all that different.
The lesson I took from this period was that people are people. No matter where you are from. People have the same hearts and the same desire to live happily. People are generally kind. But then, after the honeymoon period, the cultural shock did indeed start to slowly manifest.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the source of these feelings. They occur slowly as you acclimatise to another country. You pick things up in passing through conversation, by watching the news, by speaking to locals, by hearing stories, by watching behaviour. What appear to be minor differences in people’s outlook of what it is to live, to work, to love and to learn can equate to enormous rifts in perspective that can be difficult to understand and even harder to tolerate.
China is complex and massive. I don’t expect I will ever know it well enough to understand it completely. It’s an uncomfortable position to be critical of a place as a foreigner who willingly emigrated there. Every country has its problems. Some problems can feel particularly jarring when compared with your home country. There are these uncomfortable spots, and yet, there are many things that my country could learn from China too.
Culture shock is when the lens you use to understand the world is challenged. You are confronted with the fact that your reality is just one kind of reality. It’s no secret that the world is large, but this is what it is like to really feel what that largeness can mean. Growing up in a particular part of a country at a particular time, raised on a diet of particular media and whatever education you are lucky enough to have had shape your view of the world and your place within it on a level you can barely perceive until faced with another side of it.
Wherever you are from, it’s easy to believe that “our way is right”, but this attitude gets you nowhere. Some places see the world through a different filter, just as our filter is different to theirs. What’s wrong or right can be malleable when time and place has a say. There are as many different perspectives as there are people. Some can be difficult to accept. But if there is to be any chance of better understanding the billions of humans that populate this planet, we can only accept difference and learn how to negotiate it.
Culture shock, I argue, can take years to truly feel. It relies on understanding another part of the world well enough that you can get a glance through their window to the world. It feels uncomfortable because you realise that your understanding of the world is just a window too, and it’s not necessarily true.
Our lives are stories told to us by ourselves and whatever narratives are prevalent during the time we are alive in the countries we grow up in. To realise that these are merely stories and not the absolute truth in the world – that is culture shock. It is as much about looking at your own identity and sense of the world as it is to look at someone else’s. Sometimes, you may like what you see when you reflect on this, other times you won’t.
The lesson I took away before my struggle, reconciliation, and constant oscillation between the two with culture shock remains similar to the lesson I have learned now. We are all the same, but different at the same time. That difference is not bad, but it is there. Decrying differences is easy. Taking time to understand them is much harder. That leaves us with a choice: remain stubbornly sealed inside a world that makes more sense to us, or embrace the challenge to engage with the complicated world beyond the one we know.
