Stuff you notice during reverse culture shock PART II

Shop in my village in Indonesia

This is a second part to a post about reverse culture shock.

1.       Where do I fit in society?

I was talking recently with someone about Tinder and about the different dates she had gone on with different men since breaking up with her boyfriend a few months ago.

This is what the hip millennials are using, right? Someone told me this wasn't cool anymore!Am I not hip? Am I not a millennial? Help! I've been on the other side of the planet for years! 

We both agreed that although it is weird, and silly, when we meet someone new, we have a tendency to try to categorize them as a certain type of person (i.e. if I met this person in high school, what kind of person would they be?). It doesn’t make any sense that we do that because, considering there weren’t really many kids in my high school (~180 in my grade and less than 700 total), there were plenty of kinds of people that never were in my high school, and people change, of course. But old habits die hard. And, I guess, when you grow up being closer to the bottom of the social totem pole, you do subconsciously get defensive and try to categorize someone before you open up to them, so they can’t hurt you.  

There's a reason why this is so popular with the young folk

There are physical moments we remember for the rest of our lives. And then there are internal realizations that are deep culminations of series of moments. Perhaps it was in my second year of college. I’m going to seem incredibly naive. Let me preface this by saying that I had met people I’d consider “bad” before this point in my life. I had met people heavily into drugs, selfish people, liars, etc. But this situation felt a bit different.

On the next episode, the middle daughter learns a valuable lesson about life.
Photo from IMDB.com

My friend had been dating this guy who was in his late twenties and who lived in our college town. One time she told me nonchalantly that he had been so mad at one of his previous girlfriends that he pulled over the car he was driving, pulled the girl out of the car, took off his belt, and began beating her with it. I don’t know how hard he beat her or for how long. But I did know that I was dating this man’s “best friend” and my closest friend in college was dating him. I remember feeling so deeply disturbed by this information. A man who would beat a woman was not a good person, part of me kept repeating. Why am I dating his friend? How could I be dating someone who could forgive that? How could my friend be dating him? Shouldn’t I just walk away from this situation and not look back? But what if I was judging to harshly? I wasn’t there. Maybe he changed. This is just a story. It’s not my boyfriend’s fault if his friend is bad.

A huge part of growing up is learning that it’s very hard to make moral judgments. Forgiveness is a virtue and all, but sometimes what we’re really doing is making excuses for someone because it’s too difficult to cut him or her out of our lives.

What does this have to do with culture shock? If it’s hard to know how to judge and assess people even when entering college, it’s even harder in a completely new culture. It’s so much harder to judge if someone is being strange or offensive, if what they’re doing is normal, or they’re just excited or awkward around someone new and foreign. This leads to weird misunderstandings, both somewhat benign and more disturbing.

A month or so after I met one of the people I eventually became closest to at my village, he took one of my pictures on my Facebook without my permission, edited in Photoshop, and re-posted it. I reacted, not well, and didn’t talk to him for a month, thinking the whole thing was weird and creepy. But then I asked someone else their opinion, and they reminded me that people use social media differently in Indonesia, and he may just not know how to talk to me. He ended being one of my closest friends in my village, despite the fact that a different friend of mine in my village didn’t like him because of how he acted in middle school.

Holding grudges from childhood seems like a pretty universal experience
Photo by Flikr user Michael Robinson

I think regardless of culture clash or not, peoples actions (especially when men or women try to talk to members of the opposite sex, whether they have romantic intentions or not) get misinterpreted. Furthermore, even within your own culture, if you meet someone as an adult, you have a different impression than you would have if you had grown up with them. When you move between two very different cultures, the secretly-hasn’t-changed-much-since-high-school schema for judging people you have hiding in your subconscious gets even more stressed and tested. Sometimes you have to totally rewrite your norms and boundaries.

Rewriting your norms and boundaries is normal, but doing so can make you really question yourself and cause you to feel hypocritical. I’ve never been a particularly affectionate person, and when I meet friends or relatives, I often have mild anxiety about greeting people, especially if I know they will want to hug me or kiss me.  And yet, in Indonesia and in Korea, people can be more touchy-feely, especially older people. They aren’t necessarily physically affectionate during greetings, but friends are more likely to rub your arm, lean on you, or grab you. I also worked with a lot of children, who don't have the same physical boundaries as adults. I feel so weird because I still get anxiety when I have to greet or say goodbye to people in America, but I wasn’t often anxious if someone in Asia was affectionate to me in ways Americans normally aren’t. I always ask myself why. It doesn’t make sense. It feels like taking several steps forward and taking more back.

In my previous post about reverse culture shock, I mentioned meeting some men in Indonesia that married young teenagers when they were adults. I wouldn’t say this is common, but it’s not super rare either. The man who worked as a driver for my host mother told me one day without shame that when he was 24, he married his wife, who at the time was only 12 years old. When I asked other Indonesians about this, they were also a bit shocked, but not nearly as much as an American might be. Although people gossip about it, sometimes adult teachers in Indonesia marry their high school students (usually they wait until the girl graduates). How am I supposed to accept this? Do I hate that driver? Do I make excuses for him (i.e. well he seems to really love her, it’s more normal here)?

He seemed to a little less crazy than her mom, sometimes, I guess?
Photo form Wikipedia

Adults marrying teenagers is more normal in Indonesia than America. Accepting that fact doesn’t mean you approve of the practice. But if I met an American teacher who was dating his student, I probably would call the police and think he was a scumbag. If I meet an Indonesian doing the same, I don’t have to like his actions or him, but I probably wouldn’t judge him as harshly. Does that make me a hypocrite? Most Indonesians in my village don’t drink. And the people who do drink are seen as pretty deviant. However, if an Indonesian moved to South Korea, where binge drinking several nights a week is a normal practice for many men, should they view the average Korean man who drinks three nights a week as deviant or untrustworthy? Or should he just accept him as normal? The answers for these questions are never easy, and sometimes they leave you questioning who you are as a person and what you stand for. These questions haven't gone away now. They've only gotten more numerous. Now that I’ve come back from the Peace Corps, is it my job or duty to react to every Islamophobic comment I hear? Isn’t it better to let it go sometimes? Doesn’t that mean I’m failing at my job?

Some of the other identity issues can go even deeper. How do I talk to people? How do I deal with the fact that people aren’t interested in me everywhere I go like they were in Indonesia? Is it true I wasn’t interesting? Did people only talk to me or spend time with me because I was foreign? How much of a person or object was I to the people around me? How much of an anomaly am I right now?

Are you there, God? My body is changing. I’m  feeling hormonal and developing a beer gut, stress wrinkles, and gray hair. Photo from Wikipedia

A common thing that a lot of women (including myself) are guilty of is insisting that we aren’t like other women. I've realized how silly and shortsighted this is. That there is no such thing as a typical woman, and you don’t need to throw other women under the bus for male attention. I think it’s an understandable thing for women who have felt ostracized and been treated badly and bullied to feel, especially in combination with internalized misogyny that insists that there’s something inherently wrong or less good about femininity. It’s hard to reach this realization unless you’ve gone out of your comfort zone and looked at yourself in a different way. Growing up and going to college and meeting people that didn’t grow up with you and see you differently that people from your childhood can sometimes bring on realizations like this. Perhaps you were at the bottom of some social hierarchy, but so were a lot of women. And sometimes the wielder of the most power, or mystique can change. Sometimes an ugly boy or girl grows up to be a very attractive adult, or a very shy child becomes a full blown entertainer.

Sometimes an average woman in America goes to another country and becomes a mini-celebrity. She becomes the exotic thing. She gets more attention than she deserves. She is overwhelmed and guilty, but then there’s moments in which nobody cares that she’s there, and she is suddenly a little disappointed. And when she comes back, she's afraid of being labeled or defined simply by the fact that she has just returned home from an exotic country. But when no one cares or wants to ask about it, she's also disappointed.

photo by Flikr user alison

In some ways being the only foreigner in a village is a very clear role. You feel like you are playing a role for over two years. Sometimes this is extremely taxing, but other times it’s comforting. Although it’s not always clear what you should be doing as a Peace Corps volunteer, you kind of get a feel for how the people around you want you to be, and you play into that. When you come back home, you come back with and into more baggage. You don’t know what people what you to be. A lot of people don’t even know what Peace Corps is, don’t care, or they have some impression of you as a waste of tax payer’s money, stupid, strange, or some kind of saint.

How some people see me.
Whether you venerate her or find her extremely problematic, both  versions are apt comparisons for how people think of Peace Corps volunteers.
Photo form Wikipedia.

The author of this article makes an interesting point. He says that he doesn’t want his five year experience in Korea to be reduced to the same significance as someone’s week long vacation. It is very hard to decide how to talk about your experiences. Do you bore people constantly by starting every sentence with “In Asia...” or do you have nothing to say? Living in another country for years is different than just visiting. Even sitting around the table with relatives last week, as I listened to people talk about stories traveling or in airports, part of me wanted to yell out: I’ve been in airports all the time. I’ve had that experience and worse, or more interesting. But you don’t even know where to start. And it’s also not fair to monopolize the conversation or to seem like you’re trying to act better than the people around you. Still, a big part of you wants to make people understand that what you did wasn’t a vacation for years. It was your whole life.

On the other hand, you sometimes get too much attention that seems like empty flattery. I always find it interesting if people call me brave. It really makes me wonder. I feel as though some people are like me. They’re always going to do things like join the Peace Corps, or teach English in Asia. They are always going to move someplace new or go halfway around the world because it’s simply in our natures. Is it really brave to do something we have an urge to do? Some studies have reported that there is a gene that makes people want to travel.

Am I really brave for doing something possibly rooted in my DNA? What about how I cried in middle school during a musical audition? About how often during my life I’ve had feelings, positive and negative, about someone but never been able to express them outright? How I couldn’t bring myself to do rock climbing in tenth grade? How I quit dance class in third grade because I was scared of being made fun of? How I never applied to a better school out of undergrad because I was afraid of being rejected? There are so many things I have been scared of doing in my life.

 At the risk of sounding like a whiny, privileged, jerk, I sometimes find the weight of trying to follow the path most people I grew up with took, of getting a job near my hometown of fitting in with relatives and people I grew up with incredibly exhausting and scary, even when I know logically that the other side of the world is also boring, tiring, frustrating, stressful, and completely imperfect. I see people who have become lawyers, or doctors, or just have learned how to cook, have started a family, or have acquired really good office and other practical skills. They’ve learned how to code computer, to fix a pipe, or a car. They can make pivot tables in Excel and are pretty good at doing taxes. I really admire people who are good at things like that. I wish I could be as good as them.

I’ve always been really good at wandering off somewhere, physically and mentally. I’ve always been relaxed, patient, and curious, and logical. I’ve always wanted to entertain other people or make them laugh or think. I’ve always connected to people younger than me, and I’m fascinated by bugs and animals. I get a rush from explaining things and seeming as though I have some kind of authority. How brave is it really, to do the things I’ve always naturally gravitated towards? I didn’t have to have a strict schedule or do lots of things other adults did because I had the excuse of being foreign or different. I could use homesickness as a reason for my moodiness and desire for alone time. Being where I was played up many of my strong points and played down or masked my flaws.’

It feels something like a left handed person who suddenly has to do a lot of difficult cutting, but they finally get to cut with a pair of left-handed pair of scissors for the first time
Photo from Amazon,com

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I don’t mean to say doing the Peace Corps or moving to South Korea or traveling around Asia was easy, I experienced plenty of bad things that I may or may not have experienced if I never left America. I’ve been horribly lonely, outcast, objectified, confused to the point of tears, mentally exhausted from language barriers, and unable to express myself.  I’ve been very hot, harassed, groped, assaulted, lost, shouted, sat on planes endlessly, been bullied, been trapped in a room, had stuff stolen, stuck in traffic for hours of my life, bitten by so many bugs, spent time in lots of unclean places, suffered from countless stomach problems, had to eat food that made me sick, apologize for offenses I didn’t know I committed, walked through floods and thunderstorms, drank way too much, made a terrible fool of myself so many times, and been too hot, freezing, itchy, or anxious to sleep on so many nights. I've been judged, had my heart broken, had to say goodbye to so many people, had to make new friends over and over again, have hurt lots of people’s feelings, witness things I find morally offensive, and pretend to like things I find morally offensive. I can count plenty of new bruises and scars. With all that said, I know who I am as a person, and I realize that most of my life choices over the past seven years haven’t been brave, they’ve simply been in line with who I am. 

Perhaps the bravest thing I could do, while acknowledging that brave does not always mean smart or good, is to stop leaving and start becoming a more typical, practical adult.

2.       Nostalgia is tricky and seductive

You may be wondering why I ever came back. From where I’m sitting now in my air conditioned, comfortable bedroom in America, I can tell myself that I was good at being in the Peace Corps and good at traveling. And I miss it every day. When I was gone from home I would get so painfully homesick, but now, I sometimes get so restless to be traveling and to not be home that it almost physically hurts. I realize how ridiculous and entitled it sounds, but once you go somewhere new it feels as though you cut out a little piece of your heart and leave it there. As wiser people have said before me, when you leave a place you don’t just leave the place behind, but you leave the person you were there, and you can never quite go back to being that person.

GOODBYE, INNER INDONESIAN DISNEY
 PRINCESS ME. THE CATS WILL MISS YOU

Even now, just 2.5 months after coming back, I can find myself forgetting Indonesian words. I’m finally feeling hotter and less like I want to wear long sleeves while everyone else is wearing shorts and t-shirts. I am shedding that person that I spent years building. Even if I wasn’t always happy with who that person was, it’s sad to think she’s going away.

Nostalgia can be a wonderful, rich, and encapsulating feeling, but it’s also dishonest. In the above section nostalgia influenced me to say that I was doing what I supposed to be doing in Indonesia. It makes it easy to forget the times I felt restless there and the feelings that made me ready to move onto other things. Nostalgia and home sickness together can lead to very bitter, annoying people. In Korea, I met so many foreigners who used to make ridiculous claims about their home countries. One Canadian woman, frustrated with the Korean students she was teaching, told me that Canadian children NEVER spoke when the teacher was talking.

I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this was what Canadian classrooms looked like.
Photo from IMDB.com

The intense heartache of nostalgia makes it so easy to lie to ourselves. If I yearn for this place or part of my life so much, says this feeling, it must have been perfect, right? But how incredibly terrible would you feel if you continued to grow up and your life and habits didn’t change whatsoever? And just because something was good for you at one point in your life, it doesn’t mean it will always be good. And if something was good for you, it doesn’t mean that it was good for everyone, whether or not you realize it.

Every election cycle, at least one candidate plays on the public’s sense of nostalgia to win votes. This season, Donald Trump promises to make America great again and some portion of the public imagines a past that was somehow better and more pure than the one that exists now, even though most of history was pretty bad for anyone who wasn’t a healthy, white, wealthy, Christian male with conventional interests. When people are confused, it’s easy to convince them that things were better in the past. In South Korea, nostalgia sometimes manifests in a weird fetishization of North Korean things and people, who are more “pure” Korean. North Korean women are paraded onto talk shows in which they talk about their lives and are made objects of the viewing public. Though slightly different from nostalgia, in Indonesia you can see a growing attachment to Arabic culture as a push back to growing Western influence. Some of the recent homophobia in Indonesia seems similar to the reactionary right in America as somehow certain Indonesian groups have forgotten that there has always been a fairly prominent queer culture in most parts of Indonesia long before the modern age and colonization.

The more you travel and see different types of nostalgia manifest on the personal and the societal level, the more you realize how much of a defense, a psychological tick it is. Nostalgia becomes virulent, passionate, and dangerous when people start to feel especially unstable. It insists that everything will be perfect and okay because at some point in the past it already was perfect and you were perfectly happy. It ignores the fact that people are always going to feel disgruntled about something. It is an anchor onto which some people need to cling when they can’t imagine the future has a place for them.

Nostalgia always insists as well that somehow the person feeling nostalgic was more innocent, more blameless in that past place and time. If you are overwhelmed with guilt or feelings of inadequacy, it’s easier to remember a past time. I didn’t have to care about all the things I care about today because I didn’t know about them. People always look at children as so stress free and relaxed. But try talking to some kids sometimes. They are often incredibly stressed about school, their friendships, their parents, their siblings, their pets, their growing sense of freedom and restlessness. I don’t mean to say that to a degree children aren’t more innocent or less stressed. Most children are, but not to extent we’d like to imagine them. Sometimes it is true that our lives or our countries were better in the past, but usually never to extreme that people like to think they were.

My village in Indonesia

On more than one occasion, I spoke to a friend of mine in my village in Indonesia about how ever so slowly more factories and malls and housing complexes are being built as Jakarta continues to expand outward. The area I stayed in is still visited by college students from bigger cities like Jakarta, Bogor, and Depok because it is the closest and last “traditional” Sundanese agricultural village to Jakarta. Maybe ten years from now, if I visit Cariu, it will be factories and malls and those electric green fields hiding bats and snakes, and other strange little animals will be paved over. There will be no chickens on the road or goats screaming outside the window. There won’t be any bamboo houses, and maybe more cars and fewer motorcycles. The farmers will have retired. The young people will be drivers, or mechanics, or welders, or office workers or laborers. There might be more Indomarets and Alfamarts and less coconut stands.

Mechanic shop in my village

It will be easy then, to painfully miss the dewy mornings, the rainbow sunsets, the slow, hot pace of life. But in missing those times, I might forget, the people of Cariu might forget, that their village on the outskirts of modernization was just a much a product of history as Jakarta; from the garbage clogging the sewers, the badly paved roads, the hazy air, the tourists from the city, the shortening life spans and growing waistlines as people smoked more, walked less, and ate cheap, greasy food, the confused young people knowing they can’t work as their parents have for generations, the disappointed old people, the desire for electricity, and internet but lack of a reliable network, and the rising temperature because of all the pollution being produced in every direction around that valley in the mountains. Cariu is going to change and should change for good reasons. To hold it in some kind of time capsule wouldn’t be practical or fair to its people, even if some things will be lost.

As much as you want to tell yourself and those around you to follow their hearts, it’s important to not be a slave to nostalgia. Maybe eventually I will come to the conclusion that I should travel again back to someplace I’ve lived before or that I should go someplace new. But that realization should come knowing not just logically but emotionally that it won’t be the same experience I’ve already had. I will have to learn plenty of new lessons. I will face different challenges, and I have to try to things better than I did before. Time does not move backwards.

 “WELL ACTUALLY THIS NEWLY DISCOVERED PHYSICS PARTICLE—“
“SHUT UP, YOU”RE RUINING MY ENDING”
Photo by Flikr user Andres Vilas