Shock Shock

Traveling is all about the experience of not-belonging. It is full of observation and instances of clarity and opacity. Some elements of a host culture are apparent and have the thrill of small revelations, like the first time you say xiexie (thank you) and are given a polite bukeqi (you’re welcome) in return. Others seem so subliminal, so tacit and under the surface of things, so deeply encoded and impenetrable to foreign logic that our natural social tendency to assimilate (or at the very least, participate) is frustrated by invisible walls and rules and meanings. We struggle to speak a new language, but even in the commonality of words there are strange gaps, wide assumption-holes that threaten to swallow up attempts at friendship or solidarity. These gaps are made all the more apparent by rare uses of our own language, familiar terrain rendered senseless and without effect. There is always a question of need – we need them more than they need us – we are a novelty, while they are reality; it is we who must learn to understand; we carry the burdens of intellectual transit.

Sometimes the frustration melts into anger. Everyone seems stupid and rude and incompetent; their systems become weak and ridiculous, their craftsmanship shoddy, their hospitality cold. Other times it is funny, a surrealist comedy unfolding around us, our own home becoming part of the stage. After a meal I look across the living room and wonder aloud that we use the toaster oven there beside the TV and not in the kitchen because the counter is too small. We carry used toilet paper in a plastic sack out the door with us on our way to Chinese class in order to deposit it in the bin at the corner, and joke about bringing it to class with us as a gift. Two enormous, highly poisonous belladonna bushes overhang the walkway to our apartment. The manager tells us not to smell them or we will die. We ride our bicycles at top speed in the middle of the night, ringing our bells and cackling like maniacs because we’re sick of getting beeped at by scooters. It’s absurd – it’s hilarious. We don’t belong here – but that not-belonging also gives us a weird freedom, a not-knowing-better carte blanche to make mistakes, to misunderstand, to misbehave. We are faux pas.

Some days are good days, peaceful days. We have substantive or productive interactions; we do things we enjoy; we learn; we discover something new, another piece falls into place. I love the scent of tea, the lush green and vertical lines of the tiny woods all over campus, the spice of the foods, the variety of the cool faces around me. I relish the moments when an aspect of the China-puzzle resolves, with the satisfying weight and certainty that comes. Something I can know.

Other days are harder and full of resentment and boredom and restlessness – we have fewer outlets here; our knowledge of our options is limited. We make things up; we approximate; we take it out on ourselves. We stew and bitch and cook food and watch black market DVDs. Paul spends long hours online. I plan lessons. Occasionally I cry. More often, I do crossword puzzles or sudoku in order to use my brain and achieve some brief artificial sense of accomplishment and resolution.

We meditate often. We exercise. I dislike being left alone with my own mind; I can be very cruel, very petty. I am often angry with myself and seek distraction through discipline and work. Sometimes I have profound moments of connection with my students, and I am reminded why I am here, and who I am, what I am capable of.

This is not the first time I have lived in a country foreign to me. I knew that these thoughts were coming. I have been alienated before, gone through the lost phase, the angry phase, the funny phase, the scary dark phase, the bright and excited and comfortable phases. I have been at home abroad, and I know that home is often earned and grown, not found or built. If you have never been through it, it is difficult to describe what culture shock feels like. It has little to do with getting lost in taxis and not knowing what’s in the food you’re eating, although those things certainly take their toll. Culture shock is, for me, about wandering outside of your own skin, realizing you’ve strayed, and then seeking to crawl back inside, only to find that it no longer fits.

Culture shock is about you. It’s about eating your own fear and tasting it for what it is. It’s about confronting your prejudices, your willingness to judge, your needs and dependencies. It’s also about feeling tired and ugly and powerless. We sleep 9 hours a day. I feel fat and hideous most of the time. I cut my own hair standing half-naked in the murky light of our weird bathroom, trying to carve away some of the bad and polish up what’s still good. This is what it feels like. You don’t realize how much you rely on your friends and familiar worlds to reflect you back at yourself and tell you who you are until all the mirrors are gone. You look different to yourself in the dark.

This is powerful learning, learning to know yourself without a mirror. Something changes – it’s not just culture shock. It’s shock shock.

It is not that the experience is without its fascinations, its joys – there is so much of that, so much wonder, so much sensual exploration, so much mystery. Sometimes it’s even fun. But any account of the experience with only the surface things – the pictures, the anecdotes – would provide a weak and false impression of what the experience more richly entails, what the being here is truly like. So much of the being-here would happen just the same anywhere new, anywhere strange to our fragile social hearts and minds; as with all parts of our lives, the surface is the context, the experience is the self.

~ by knifemaker on October 13, 2007.