Reflecting on Being Home: Culture Shock?
During job interviews, I usually report my skills/strengths as being patience and flexibility. I have yet to find a job that doesn’t poop their pants in excitement over these two mildly-impressive traits. I do hope that I’m patient and flexible, but I might have a slightly different connotation than the potential employer. They might envision an adaptive employee who is cool going with the flow. But here’s what I actually mean: I will walk two hours to a meeting that I could have biked or bus-ed to in a quarter of the time, and when I get there early, I sit down in the sun and read. Bonus: I get my days mixed up, so I now have an hour of reading. Back to the skills/strengths: if I were honest, I’d note ‘reflection’ as a skill. I’m such a good reflector that I have already, in fact, reflected thoroughly over the last few sentences. I’m so reflective that I pre-reflect on what words are about to come out of my mouth. Sometimes, they never come out, because I get so mired in reflection. I’d be perfectly happy spending an afternoon ruminating over and sharing various and vague musings with a friend. If I had a beard, I’d stroke the shit out of it. It’d be so thoroughly stroked that it’d look like it was ironed. I’d never cut it and so my strokes would become longer in duration, as I worked my way from my chin all the way down. Precision is never something I list as a strength: teaspoons snowball into tablespoons, 2 cloves of garlic becomes a full head; I sprinkle in commas when a sentence looks too lonely; all attempted arts and crafts becomes impressionistic within moments; I listen to someone patiently remind me ‘lefty-loosey’ while I crank bolts to the right; I ‘fix’ my hair into a frizzy rhododendron poof; I respond in Italian to “Ni Hao”; I make up words that feel right; my lowest academic grades were in Tech ed (think: wood and drills) and Family and Consumer Science (think: money and sewing)...My musings thrive under conditions of vague loosery rather than precision. I talk about thinking until I can neither think nor talk. The great thing about writing is sometimes I can straighten my frayed and looped yarns of thought into sentences that mean things. Other times, I simply write myself into more of a loop (see: this passage). Plus, writing is reflection in action. I often never get to the actual manifestation of speech due to my reflective qualities; however, writing allows me to both communicate AND reflect, which is perhaps the only way I know how to communicate. It sometimes helps me discover what it is I’m trying to understand.
I’m trying to understand China and what I learned there. Today, I’m taking this angle: Culture Shock
Culture Shock: Culture shock? Coming home from Uganda and Laos, I noticed the wealth, the convenience, the lifestyle differences, the bewildering gap in opportunities, the lack of time spent sitting around under mango and tamarind trees. This time around, the differences are, in some ways, less obvious. China and the US are estranged parents-in-law; they both want to raise the world in a different way. But, don’t be deceived- they both absolutely want to own it. China is all at once the most foreign and the most familiar place that I’ve lived. People love shopping, they drink Starbucks, they compete, they rush, they consume. On the whole, a transplanted American in China might not feel so out of place. I mean, there's a few things to get used to, such as using your legs to walk and speaking Mandarin... And then there’s the half-submerged centuries-old behemoth of Chinese culture that stretches below and looms above everything. But, you know, you can drink a soy latte while China erects a shopping mall the size of Maryland across the street from you. Yes, Dorothy. This is still (sort of) Kansas.
Culture shock? This time around, I have generalized culture shock. In fact, between China and the US, I am shocked senseless. The things that shock me are hidden and not-hidden. Sitting on a city bus in Wuhan, we fly past old homes that are in the process of being demolished; the buildings literally crumble before my eyes. What I can't see: the families that have been forced out and 'relocated.' There’s a new shopping mall to be built. This one will be called “World Bistro College”- possibly it was named by a 57 year-old Chinese business tycoon with an enviable potbelly and slippery grasp of English. It’s the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen. We don’t talk about it. “What actually happened?” a student asks me as we walk across campus. I look at the camera behind her, in front of her, to the side of her. Their red eyes blink. Hundreds of miles west of Wuhan, millions of Uyghur Muslims are kept in prisons; they don their traditional clothing, smile, and dance for foreign journalists when they are finally allowed inside. In and out of sight. Then there’s the US. Sidewalks crumble, elders are tucked away into quarantines with nice gardens that no one walks in, children sit on bare floors in prisons, dazed and alone; immigrants languish in concentration camps and slaughter the meat that we’ll pick up after work at Target. Wealth is branded to not look wealthy. I take a sleek bike-highway to cross the cities, feeling good about the beautiful day and the exercise; I pass by a man huffing paint- the explosion of fumes is sudden and loud. He’s alone. Who will see him? Where are all the ICE facilities and meathouses? Police calmly extinguish lives; they respond to domestic calls with guns drawn. Native land is still stolen and being stolen again. Pollutants creep into our water, bodies, lives. The Amazon burns.
If I’m not shocked, then I’m not paying attention. So yes, I’m experiencing culture shock. Let’s talk about it.
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