Culture Shock...6 Months Late

Yes, I know that you are supposed to suffer from culture shock when you first start to live in a new country. And I suppose I did have some culture shock in the beginning (6 months ago). After all, the Chinese culture is very different from the U.S. culture. I had to get used to the way of eating - communal dishes in the middle of the table that everyone eats from, toilets that are not Western, people staring at me because I am Western, etc. However, it was not a difficult thing for me to assimilate to the new culture. I adjusted easily.

This is why, when I was trying to analyze my feelings last week (I graduated as a psychology major, that is what I do), it took me quite a while to understand exactly what I was feeling. Was I homesick? No, not really. Sad? No. Frustrated? A bit... Then it hit me: Oh, so this is what culture shock really feels like. For one week, I stayed in a very small town with a family that I would not say is poor, but I would also not call them rich. I would definitely say that they were very careful with their money. Living in this small town, with this family, I finally, truly understood the term culture shock.

In America, as in my apartment in Suzhou, we have heating in the winter. It is winter, it is cold, I put the heat on, I am happy. No. Not in some places in China. Not there. The apartment was just as cold as it was outside. I knew, though, that they had a miniature heater. They used it the first day when they had relatives over. Then, to my dismay, they wrapped it back up in the plastic it came in and put it back in the box. I never saw it again. "Ni leng ma?" Are you cold? They asked me. I wanted the heater back. "A little", I answered in Chinese. Maybe it was rude, maybe I should have said I was fine, that I was not cold at all. But I don't like to lie, and I was freezing to death. OK, maybe not to death, but I was shivering - I was really cold. Put on your coat, they suggested. If my coat was on, they suggested I put on even more layers.

They told me that they reason I was cold is because I don't eat meat. If I ate meat, I would not be cold. Usually, people respect my vegetarianism. No, almost every day they tried to get me to eat meat. It's good, it's healthy, I heard over and over again. "Just try it". I tried to get them to understand that I was not cold because of my moral decision - being a vegetarian did not make me cold. I explained that my father is also often cold, and he loves meat. Finally they stopped bugging me about meat.

Their hygiene was just a bit different from what my parents taught me growing up. Besides never washing hands with soap after using the washroom (that I saw - and since they never closed the door all the way, I unintentionally saw a lot), they never covered their mouths when they coughed. This was absolutely wonderful when we were all sitting together eating and somebody had a coughing fit - right into our communal food - or when we were sitting next to each other talking.

I often lost my appetite. Everyday we went to the market where they bought food. Vendors spread out their food all around - some was on the ground on plastic garbage bags and some was on tables. Everywhere we walked, people selling and people buying spit on the ground as they strolled around or coughed into the air. I watched as the spit and the cough neared the food we were about the buy. Yum, yum. And some of this food wasn't cooked, some of it was barely washed (or not at all washed). The family I was staying with also liked to hand feed me. Besides making me feel like I was three years old again, this made me wince, knowing where and what their hands had touched (and how often they had been washed). Yes, my parents brought me up with a strict sense of hygeine - often wash hands, always use soap. It makes me wince when people don't. I winced a lot.

Lastly was the way people stared at me in the town. I have lived in China for six months; I am used to being stared at. If you are a westerner, a laowai, it is a way of life. But here it was different. I am pretty sure that many of the people here had never seen someone like me before except on the t.v. Instead of just staring and pointing, their eyes would follow me as I walked by. Some children would shyly stammer, "hello". Some would run away and hide behind their parents. The adults, on the other hand, all saw me as a curious object. They looked at me, then there were double takes, even triple-takes. Everyone came up to the lady I was with (who had her arm wrapped around mine, gripping my coat as if she were scared I would run away) and asked in their dialect, "Does she understand what we say?" "She understands putonghua" (mandarin), responded my host. And, of course, they then always started rapid converstations in their squiggly dialect so that the only thing I could understand was that they were talking about me. Once in a while, someone would not believe my host that I can speak mandarin and tried to test my knowledge, asking me ridiculous questions that I knew they already knew the answer to. "Where are you from?", "How do you know her?" (pointing to my host). I smiled and tried to be patient.

As if being stared at on the street was not enough, the family I was staying with did not use their bathroom for showers. Oh no. Little did I know when I first arrived, I was to use the Public Baths to take a shower. When my host announced "Time to take a shower", and told me to pack my stuff, I hoped in vain: maybe we are going to a hotel for me to take a shower in a hotel room, maybe we are going to her friend's house, but with each step closer to the public baths, my heart dropped a little more. I am by nature a very modest person - I do not like to be without clothes in the gyms in America, where people are used to bodies of every kind. To shower completely naked with Chinese women, many of whom had never seen a foreigner before and, as I explained in the above paragraph, more than stared at me, was terrifying. The only comfort was that I took off my glasses before I entered the shower room so I could not see the women staring at me. Of course, after a while it was not as bad as I had thought. It was warm there, which was a large plus. The second time at the baths, I did not even dread it.

So, now I have gotten used to even more of the Chinese culture - a completely different part of the Chinese culture. I can live without heat, without warm water, with no English spoken at all, and I can take public baths. And now, when people talk about culture shock, I can empathize. I understand thoroughly and completely what they mean.