Culture Shock
Culture Shock
The United States is a multicultural country; it is a big melting pot in which each person brings his peculiarity to enrich the culture. However, this process of melting is always pain free. My family came to the U.S. in the early 90’s, I recall my father explaining to me that, and he felt an intense culture shock. They were perpetually in a state of bewilderment, anxiety, and disoriented because they had suddenly been exposed to social cultural environment radically different from their own. I also had a great amount of pain trying to assimilate to this artificial culture. Because of the huge language difference between Chinese and English, I was often ostracized in school simply due the fact that I was silent. Silence in many Asian cultures is sign of respect, because one should only speak if their words contribute to learning, but here participation is highly encouraged, and often I was viewed as “abnormal”.
The system of values that I grew up with also changed. When I first stepped into an American class room, I was suppressed that kids were calling their teacher by their first name, the classroom was noisy, disorganized, and had terrible stick-figure drawings all over the walls. I found it interesting that American teachers usually asked the Asian students to explain subjects of higher difficulty, and they would ask me to explain about Japanese culture because we were learning about Asian culture in History.
Perhaps the most surprising thing to me is the concept of homosexuality, which does not exist in Asian cultures because people will always hide it. It made me very uneasy at first, but since I managed to make it through the American education system and became a respectable citizen, I was able to understand I shouldn’t judge on other people’s preferences. If cultural relativism is true, how come people are suffering simply under the fear of unknown?
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