Coming or Going
“Who are YOU?” Said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I–I hardly know, sir, just at present– at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” Said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”
“I can’t explain MYSELF, I’m afraid, sir” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” –Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
I walked around the feria (farmer’s market) in Northeast Brazil, not sure where the sights and smells ended and I began. Who was I? And did that change when I added the question “where was I?” Why had I even come to Brazil? I thought it had been to help street children and teach English, but I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Voce quer frutas?” The winkled hand of the elderly woman held a pineapple towards me. I smiled and moved on quickly, as unsure of what I wanted as I was of what she had said. “Smile and nod” I thought to myself, “smile and nod.”
“Culture shock is when your thoughts, ideas, and what you have learned hit a barrier of new ideas, concepts, and thoughts and you can’t accept or struggle to accept them.” Emanuel told me as he helped me weave through the fruit and vegetable stalls set up along the cobblestone road. Emanuel returned to the elderly woman and bought me a pineapple as we turned a corner of the feria in his small town, just seven degrees from the equator. I followed behind him quietly.
Emanuel walked confidently with the fair skin and dark, curly hair of his Portuguese ancestors. A hard working Brazilian, Emanuel had learned perfect English and was now teaching English, with future hopes to visit America. We quickly became friends with our common goals and ability to communicate in the same language. Emanuel would show me places while explaining the culture and reason behind them. He was a listening ear that I eagerly poured into after being surrounded by Portuguese.
Finding yourself in a new place can be scary. The anxiety and feelings that you encounter while being in another country (or simply a different culture) has been labeled “Culture shock.” Said in many different terms by many different people, there are normally (at least) three phases to culture shock: honeymoon, negotiation, and adjustment.
Honeymoon stage
Sitting on the cool tile floor eating fresh pineapple, I waved my hands energetically and sprayed pineapple juice on Emanuel: “I just cannot get over the beauty. I can’t get over the feeling that each day is an adventure because I have no clue what is going on. I have this idea that I will learn something new every minute if only my brain could contain it.”
The honeymoon stage is everything from pre-experience excitement to initial contact and delight with novelty. Differences are seen in a romantic light, exotic and fascinating.
“You speake Engliss?” asked a dark, curly haired stranger as he leaned in to kiss me on my left cheek and then my right.
“Y-yes” I blushed and replied shyly, unsure of what was culturally correct to do next. Some friends I made during my first few days in Brazil asked me to teach an English class for them. My credentials? I was a native speaker. Thirty people showed up, most of whom I had never seen before.
I cleared my throat, pulled my sweaty palms out of my pockets, and began: “My name is Rachel, what is your name?”
Negotiation stage
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more” –Dorothy, Wizard of Oz
I sighed, and waited. What could I do? The only one home was the maid, who didn’t speak English. I rested against the tile wall and tried to figure out the best solution. There was no toilet paper, I didn’t know the word for “Toilet paper” in Portuguese, and I needed toilet paper. I could try yelling “papel of toilet!” and hope the maid would get the idea.
In the negotiation stage, things that used to be beautiful are now irritating. New things make you frustrated rather than enchanted. All you want is (fill in the blank), and it always stays just out of reach. Things that bother you the most might be public hygiene, personal habits, and food. This stage can have mood swings and can lead to depression or withdrawal from the new culture.
“Whoa! What’s wrong?” Emanuel held onto my shoulders as I tried to calm down and speak through my tears.
“I feel like the world is in front of my hand and I don’t even have enough strength to reach out and grab it anymore.” I told him through gasps.
I couldn’t handle this. Emanuel had told me this moment would come, but I had shrugged his words off. This was the final straw. I had been waiting weeks for a package from my family. It had finally arrived, and after waiting two hours at the post office, they would not give me the package because I didn’t have my passport with me.
Emanuel walked me down to the post office, but I refused to go in. He went in and five minutes later had my package. I had been in the wrong line. Since they knew him personally, they gave him the package, even though it was addressed to me. I wasn’t sure if I want to keep crying or start laughing.
Later, sitting alone on top of a hill, the Brazilian wind whipped through my hair as I held down the paper and wrote quickly “I am so far away from American culture and thinking, surrounded by different everything—it makes me wonder who I am. I have no expectations to live up to. No one here knows who I am, what I stand for, and what I believe. It is like a blank piece of paper, and I have no idea what I want to write on it.”
Negotiation isn’t just about figuring out new customs and cultures. It is also figuring out yourself within those new situations—which is often more surprising.
Emanuel and I watched the stars spread out like I had never seen them before. The dim rural lights didn’t distract from the clear blackness of the massive sky. I couldn’t find the big dipper in the southern hemisphere.
“Even the stars are different here. Is there nothing sacred?” I remarked callously, “Emanuel, I have no talents here. Nothing. Even cooking macaroni and cheese scares me: the oven is different, the cheese is different, the milk is different…my cooking skills are reduced to nada along with everything else.”
“It will come.” He replied into the darkness.
Adjustment phase
It happened, just as Emanuel said it would. I adjusted.
“What was it like?” Emanuel asked, as we dug into the meat filled pancakes.
“It was hard because coming here I was the extra person added to the mix, instead of making up part of the mix. I had to learn to be like icing on the cake: the icing has to form to the mold of the cake, trying to fill in the cracks and help out where it can.”
By the time of adjustment, you have developed new routines, and things, in a different sense, feel “normal.” You begin to either understand the new culture, or understand that you don’t understand it yet, and that is okay.
Three groups of people arise from the adjustment phase: rejectors (60% of expatriates are in this group—they isolate themselves until they can leave), adopters (10% of expatriates are in this group—fully integrated while losing their original identity—they normally stay in the new country), and cosmopolitans (30% of expatriates are in this group—they adapt and blend what they like from their original and host countries.
Reverse Culture Shock
“Not all who wander are lost” J. R. R. Tolkien
“It isn’t like the movies.” Emanuel says to me, sipping his milkshake at Steak ‘n’ Shake. After all his hard work, he had finally come to America, and it wasn’t exactly what he had thought it would be.
“I know,” I nod my agreement. I had been home from Brazil for some time now, but Emanuel had just arrived. While Emanuel was dealing with his first culture shock, I was still dealing with reverse culture shock.
“It is so weird, Emanuel—it is like nothing is real. Being back, my thoughts flake off and float down to the floor. What is mine? What is me? I am stumbling through life. Not half bad, but not all there. And no one else knows me well enough to know I am not here. Not here really. I am living outside myself.”
Emanuel finished his shake and nodded, understandingly.
The same three stages can be seen in returning home after being gone. In some, it is noticed even stronger than while in another country. Only 7 percent of returning teenagers said they felt at home with their peers in the United States. Seventy-five percent of returning soldiers said they found reentry “difficult, time-consuming, and acrimonious.”
Reverse culture shock is worse for many people because they are not expecting it. They expect things to be different in a new place, but not where they grew up. All your old “normals” feel strange.
Emanuel stops as I unlock my car door. “Brazilians have a word for it that you do not: “Saudades.” You can’t explain it—you have to feel it. It is the longing, melancholy feeling that never fully leaves you, even when you are happy. You feel saudades when you want to be with the ones you love, but you can’t. It is when you long for something that is out of your hands, out of your control. This word, saudades, is what you have carried with you back to America.”
Honeymoon phase
“Cinnabon!” My brain and stomach yell at the same time.
The first thing I smell at the Miami airport is the gooey icing dripping off the sticky bun, and I must have one. When finished, I wipe my mouth and turn into the restroom where the toilet flushes for me, the water turns on and off after detecting my presence, and I wave my hands and wait for the little red light to signal the paper towel dispenser. I am a long way from sitting on the toilet, calling out desperately to the maid for “papel of toilet.”
But the honeymoon phase doesn’t last for long.
I stare down the row of soy sauces at Kroger, the glass bottles blurring and my head pounding. I sink down to the dingy linoleum floor and rest my back against the aisle of cereal boxes.
“Just pick up some soy sauce. Just pick it up and go.” My brain tells me, but my body refuses to comply.
So many choices. So much stuff. I miss the feria in Brazil with fresh fruit and vegetables. I miss the two aisles that make up the entire grocery store in the rural town. My rural town. I am overloaded with everything around me, all the advertisements competing for my attention.
“It isn’t fair. It is not right.” I complain to my mom as I hand her the soy sauce. “We have so much, and we don’t even know it.”
Negotiation phase
“I went a little farther,” he said. “Then still a little farther—till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back.” –Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown
It is often hard to remember that things have changed while you have been away, or that your ideal of home (while gone) is not reality. Many times people don’t want to hear about your trip—and even if they do, they just don’t seem to “get it.” This can lead to the same kind of frustration as you had in the original negotiation stage. You miss what you have left behind, and no one seems to understand how you have changed—but you slowly fall back into routine—but never as the same person you were before.
“Thank you for having me in your home.” Emanuel says as I hand him towels and show him how to work the shower.
“After all you did for me in Brazil? Of course!” I shrug him off. I am happy to have someone to talk to about everything I have left behind. I am glad to have someone who understands.
“Brazil has problems…but it is still home.” Emanuel shares, “How are you doing in being back in America?”
“I returned and felt like everything had changed. Before my friends and I were all triangles. While there, I became a square—with even more angles—while my friends were all rounded off into circles. Now I am constantly bumping corners.”
“It will come.” He says quietly.
Adjustment stage
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” –G.K. Chesterton
I pause as I put on my coat to go to the art museum, and turn to Emanuel reflectively, “There are some things that I can only learn in Brazil, and others I can only learn in America.”
Having spent three of the past six years in Brazil, (continuing to teach English, but now focusing on working with street children), I can now talk with Emanuel in Portuguese—but we always return to English. Emanuel is now finishing his master’s degree and enjoying more opportunities teaching English.
“I can’t believe I am going home tomorrow.” Emanuel shakes his head, “It makes me remember what the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes said, “It was good while it lasted.” What I will take home from my time in America is that your home country is where your blood is from. Your culture talks when you are in another country, so be careful about your actions when you are not home.”
“But are you ready to go home?” I tilt my head and question.
“Yes. I didn’t think I would be, but I am.” Emanuel replies confidently. “And when are you coming back to Brazil?”
“I am not sure yet,” I tell him truthfully as I let out my breath, “But I will go back. I have been coming and going between countries so much that at times I feel blurred, but I would not change anything. I have become my own person, a blend of two lives in two countries. Brazil and America make up who I am and are a part of me, but I am still a whole me on my own. It has taken a long time to be able to say that.”
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” –T.S. Eliot
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