Reverse culture shock.

Hydrangeas at Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath 

The British Museum

Those of you who saw me over the two weeks I was home visiting London will have almost definitely have heard me talk about what I like to call reverse culture shock. Reverse culture shock is the name I give to the feeling I got when I came back to England and it suddenly hit me how different China really is. Having seen me, my friends may not say that they think I've changed all that much (or maybe they think that I have) but going home made me feel like I'd changed. Some people said that I now speak very loudly - so I'm convinced I'm going deaf - possibly a side effect of not having to self-censor or think about other people understanding you in public; others have said that my accent has gone a bit funny, the side effect of hanging around with so many other accents and teaching American English. But the differences are more complex than that. People have always said that travel helps you to find yourself, to find out what kind of person you really are, and I always thought that was a bit too cheesy and new-age for me; but the longer I'm away and the more I see the more I think that it's true. This past year and a half of travelling has taken me out of my comfort zone and made me re-evaluate a lot of my deep set ideas about everything; from what is "normal" to what constitutes a "good meal".  I think that's why going back to where I grew up gave me a bit of a culture shock, going back and finding that I thought in a different way.

The Kew Gardens Sky Walk

When I arrived in England my first thought was "Oh, this is nice. I can speak English and everyone understands me!" but then as I drove out of the airport with my mum I saw a lady walking down the road and I pointed at her and shouted at my mum to look, there was a foreigner! It was only when the words were out my mouth that I realized how silly they sounded, this woman wasn't a foreigner at all. She just wasn't Chinese. That was the beginning of my culture shock. It took me a few days to adjust to life back in the UK, it wasn't only big differences - like calling non-Chinese natives foreigners - but small things too. I kept looking the wrong way to cross the road, and one day I walked into a shop and said "ni hao" to the shopkeeper. I kept smiling at "foreigners" when I walked down the street (a very un-London thing to do) because of our solidarity as "foreigners", and the weirdest thing to me was when I saw a Chinese family but they were speaking English, it just seemed weird. All these little things made me wonder how I had forgotten so quickly what it was like to live in such a multi-cultural city as London. How quickly I had gotten used to being the minority, rather than the norm; and how quickly I'd made China my new normal.

I always tell people I didn't really experience any culture shock coming to China but experiencing a sense of culture shock in my own country has made me wonder why that is. Why didn't China, which was and is so different to everything I had ever experienced before, throw me off balance? How did I slide so easily into such a different lifestyle? Where was the culture shock?

St. Paul's Cathedral from the Millennium Bridge

I think the answer is partly that I had no expectations when coming to China. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into and so didn't have anything to compare my reality to. I think it also helped arriving in a situation where I was surrounded by foreigners and wasn't thrown in at the deep end of Chinese life, so to speak. There was time to acclimatise to the food, and the people, and the alienness of China while I was with people who all shared the same feeling. Of course, once thrown out of this comfort zone there were things that shook my concept of what China was, as demonstrated by my extensive lists of Chinese oddities, but I never got that over whelming shock and I'm glad. Culture shock is probably the thing that most unsettled those who didn't stay long in China. Either the country didn't meet their expectations or the differences between China and home were too big. Culture shock can be all consuming, but if you can overcome it a find a new normal it' s indescribably rewarding to truly integrate into another culture.
England and London will always be my true home, but now China also feels comfortable enough to call home.