Settling into a New Culture: The Culture Shock

I think the term "culture shock" is one of the biggest misnomers I've ever heard.  Yes, there is a cultural element to it.  But no, it does not come as a shock, I don't know of anyone who woke up one morning, sat bolt upright in bed, and gasped," OH MY GOD I'M IN AMERICA."

It is a lot more subtle than that, and I know I spent months and months denying I ever experienced it.  I am a socially awkward kid, and it took me a year before I started getting comfortable with who I was in the US.  I mean, I was the joker kid in my social circles in high school, and during my first year in the US I was too terrified of talking because I was scared someone would laugh in my face over my accent.  Not to mention the fact that this fear was solidified in my very being when one of the first people I talked to in the US didn't understand something I was saying to her after repeating it back to her 3 times.  She also very kindly reminded me that she still didn't understand what I was saying each time by snapping, "What?!"

I remember the extent of my fear of talking.  I worked a campus job during my first summer in the US, and there were days when I'd turn up to work and say nothing to my coworkers except for "Good morning" and "Good night".  They probably found me really weird.

One of the biggest things I had to get used to was recognizing that I could no longer live in my own bubble and pretend that I was invisible to everyone else.  That worked fine in Singapore, I mean, after all we have 5 million people squeezed in an island that's only half the size of Los Angeles proper, so I was essentially invisible in that crowd of people.  So it was perfectly acceptable to walk around and not make eye contact with people you were walking by.  And because everybody was so busy in the metropolitan city of Singapore, it was also perfectly acceptable to walk up to a shopkeeper and say, "1 teh-ping (iced tea)" and nothing else.

Coming to the US, ordering a sandwich at Subway suddenly felt like an overwhelming, daunting task.  I was supposed to smile at the sandwich maker, ask them how their day was going, and then ask for the ingredients.

Here's how I would've done it in Singapore: "6-inch Italian, oven-roasted chicken, Provolone, toasted, lettuce-tomato-peppers-onion, Chipotle Southwest."  No facial expressions required.

And in the US I suddenly had to pull the muscles on my face to make a smile, and ask the sandwich maker, "How's it going?" And then after the usual niceties, it would've gone something like, "Could I please get the 6-inch Italian with oven-roasted chicken?  Could I please have Provolone?  Toasted, please.  Could I get the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and onion?  For the dressing could I please get the Chipotle Southwest?" It felt terribly tedious.

The good news is that it only gets better.  The new cultural practices started feeling like second nature after a while, I didn't have to think through everything I said to feel like I could fit in, and I wasn't horrendously self-conscious.  And the Little Alien lived happily ever after in the USA.

That's all for today, my Fellow Aliens!