Culture Shock: Journey to the East

I know that anyone that has made the mistake of asking Bry or me about China has probably heard this story, but I have a new version. For a class, I was required to write about an experience with culture shock and analyze it a bit. This is the paper that I wrote. The end of it is kind of lame but the beginning of my story is fairly entertaining. And I do apologize that it's ridiculously long. I'll throw in some pictures to make it more palatable.

Culture Shock:

Journey to the East

           

I often say that my first six hours in China were the worst six hours in my entire life, followed by the best three months of my entire existence. It all began, however, before we had even stepped off the last plane, on August 29^th, 2008. I called the airline the day before our plane was scheduled to leave only to learn that our flight had been cancelled. My sister and I were booked free of charge on a flight leaving a day later. No big deal. When we arrived in San Francisco we had to go through extra special security saved for provoked peoples like ourselves who had had their plans pushed back a day. They put us through a bomb detection machine. It was like being in a wind tunnel. No big deal. The plane my sister and I took from San Francisco to Los Angeles was my first plane ride in memory. The plane from Los Angeles to Beijing was the longest wait of my life. A fourteen hour plane ride where all my sister and I could do was talk about what China might be like when we arrived. The plane was enormous. There were hundreds of us, albeit most of the other passengers were Chinese, all crammed into a giant tin can in the sky. I should have been terrified but I was just so excited that my face hurt from smiling. I couldn’t sleep I was so excited, although that was partly the fault of how little my chair would recline. I’d spent months being excited but nothing compared to actually being on the plane. The plane! To China!

Cell phones being allowed on a fourteen hour flight would only make things worse.

The seats were all blue and had Chinese writing on them. There was a screen ahead of us that, in between showing movies, told us our altitude, how fast we were flying, where we were around the globe and how cold it was outside at all times. The flight attendants were all Chinese but spoke fluent English. They were all women except for one ever-happy man. He was always smiling. It kept me smiling while the little Chinese children around me screamed. The women kept me happy by bringing me meal after meal. We were never hungry because they fed us dinner, a snack, and then breakfast. It was a fourteen hour flight after all. My sister and I were stuck in the center row, trapped between an elderly married couple. Why couldn’t they sit next to each other? My sister and I constantly had to wake them up so we could get to the restroom or stretch our legs. But it was no big deal. We were on the plane. Nothing compared to this excitement. When the plane landed they played “Beijing Huan Ying Ni” over the speaker. Beijing welcomes you! That was the official song of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Though I had watched the opening ceremony, I was unaware of that at the time.

           

Can you find our old man crush?

            Stepping down off the plane, I had my first cultural bump where I thought, “Well, that’s not quite what I was expecting.” I stepped out into the sunlight and saw… nothing. We had landed far away from the airport itself and all had to take buses to the airport in order to catch our connecting flights. Instead of seeing lots of other planes and buildings as I had expected I saw only empty land, and mountains in the distance. Isn’t Beijing supposed to be a huge city? My sister and I got on a bus and drove for what felt like forever. How was this airport so big? We were unaware at the time that Terminal 3, where we had just landed and were scheduled to  be spending only an hour, was the largest terminal in the entire world at the time. “Terminal 3 is larger than London Heathrow Airport's 5 terminals combined with another 17% to spare” (Beijing).

Looking forward to getting to return. They had the best useless crap to buy as souvenirs.

There was so much we didn’t know. I’d never taken a Chinese history class. I knew only the most basic of phrases in Mandarin. But I could read the signs! It took a moment to realize that they were in English. How convenient. Once my sister and I rode some sort of subway into the airport, made our way through customs and security, we attempted to claim our luggage but were told that it would be waiting for us at the next airport as it had just been transferred to the next plane for us. Aren’t the Chinese nice? We were given hand written directions to our gate and leisurely made our way there. We had ten minutes to spare. The gentlemen taking tickets checked ours and kindly let us know that we were at the wrong gate. What we had assumed was a Chinese character that we didn’t recognize was actually the number five. We were, in fact, fifty gates away from where we needed to be. No big deal. The plane would wait for us, right?

I Googled "plane waiting" and got this. Teehee.

We ran as fast as we could only to watch the doors shut in front of our face. Not the doors to the plane, of course, but the doors to the gate we had to go through to get onto a bus that would shuttle us to our plane. It left without us. We anxiously turned to the woman in uniform next to us and demanded, “When is the next bus coming?!” She informed us that there was no other bus. We explained our situation: that our bags were on that plane and that in an hour there was someone picking us up from the Xianyang airport. We had to be on that plane. She told us to follow her, and, like the scared nineteen year old American girls that we were, we followed with fear in our hearts for the first time during the trip. This was kind of a big deal. She talked to another woman and we were informed that they had booked us, free of charge, onto the next flight leaving for the Xianyang airport. It was leaving in hour. We would only be an hour late. Crisis averted! Surely the person picking us up would wait a mere hour for us, right?

We were given the options of Western or Chinese breakfasts
and decided to choose the more familiar of the two.

On our next plane, we were fed breakfast yet again. This plane was fairly small. It was even smaller than the one we had taken from San Francisco to Las Angeles but at least for this flight we could look out the windows. We were finally flying during the day. It was about seven or eight in the morning and, blissfully unaware of Chinese geography, we spent the entire hour long flight looking out our window in search of the Great Wall. What we didn’t know, and what would later make us feel foolish that we’d searched so long, was that the Great Wall is about an hour drive north of Beijing and we were flying west. None of this mattered at the moment, though, because we were on the plane! The wrong plane, I’ll give you that, but we were only an hour away from our destination. I wrote in my travel diary as my sister and I attempted to ignore stares. We were the only white people on this plane, and this was a small plane. Every passenger had noticed the identical blonde twins walk. No big deal. We were entirely used to this after nineteen years.

As you can see, I googled twins and these were the first four results.

Clearly we're the most important twins the internet has ever met.

After what was irrefutably the shortest hour of my life, we stepped off our plane and into the Xianyang airport. We found our luggage (Thank the gods!) and quickly ended up in the area where you stereotypically see people holding signs in the movies. There were people waiting for passengers but no one paid us any attention. We waited. Everyone left. We tried to find someone to talk to. Everyone in Beijing had spoken English but nobody seemed to here. No need to panic, we’d just give our teacher a quick phone call. We found a pay phone and searched our bags. We only had her number at HSU. No need to panic, we’d just make an international call home and get our mom to contact someone for us. We couldn’t figure out our prepaid phone cards to make an international call. We stood next to the phone, eerily calm, and attempted to devise our next move. We were then approached by a man who claimed to be something along the lines of the manager of the airport and spoke pretty fair English. He asked us if he could help get us a taxi. There were two men flanking him. Waiting. Smiling. We debated this. If we left the airport, even knowing where we were going, the man who was supposed to pick us up would never find us. But that probably didn’t matter. If we could just get to campus, we could probably find where we needed to be. No big deal.

Clearly, we were suffering from huge amounts of denial.

We allowed the men to take our bags and put them in their… van? Did China not have taxis? How strange. We climbed in and buckled our… There were no seatbelts. That’s fine. These guys probably knew how to not crash a car. Or van. No problem. The man driving never spoke but the other man in the front seat spoke some amusing broken English. We gave him the address of our school and then made small talk. The man driving pulled into a parking lot. The men got out of the van and transferred our bags into a car. We were told that the man that spoke no English knew where we were going and would take us there but that the man who knew English couldn’t fit in the car with all of our bags and would leave us at this point. Goodbye! Okay, no problem. The guy knew where he was going and it would probably take like five minutes, right?

It looked like this but ten years older.

We passed a bright green car. What did it say on the side? Did that say taxi written in plain English? So, China does have taxis. What were we driving in? We drove out of Xianyang and onto a freeway. We drove for forty minutes at least. We were unaware at the time that the Xi’an airport was actually in the next city over from our school. Bry and I sat silently in the back seat. We were calm. The road was wide, nearly devoid of all other vehicles, and we couldn’t read any of the signs. At last we found ourselves in a city again. The buildings grew taller and taller and our driver took us through many crowded back alleys were people played Frogger in front of dozens of cars.

Just so that we're clear here, the cars WILL NOT stop for you.

When the man finally pulled over and stopped his “cab”, we were on a small street, in the middle of the city, and saw no school. This isn’t where we’re supposed to be, we insisted. He pointed to his left and we saw the gate to our school. It was glorious, thirty foot tall gate that said the Xi’an International Studies University in characters and in English across the top. Relief washed over as we pulled our bags from the car. “Money?” it turns out, was the only English phrase the man knew. We paid him 200 yuan, a huge rip off we would later learn, and dragged our bags around campus for two hours before finally finding our hotel. Our teacher found us in our room. We hugged her and cried with yet more relief, and she took us out to lunch.

This is probably what we seemed like when our teacher finally found us.

Fair warning, everything after this is the part of my paper that was boring. You can, however, skim to the bottom for advice.

This long, rollercoaster of a story, is a perfect example of Carly Dodd’s model of culture shock, which we discussed in class. While I was experiencing all of these new things and feelings, I was only aware of how I felt in each moment, but I can now look back and break down each stage. Let’s start at the beginning of my experience. The first stage of Dodd’s culture shock model is Eager Expectation (Culture Shock). I had been feeling this the entire summer before ever stepping onto an airplane, but even on the first two airplanes I felt this. All I did during my free time was daydream about how amazing China was going to be. The things I’d see, touch, eat, smell. During the fourteen hour flight, however, I began transitioning into the Everything is Beautiful stage. The old people that were constantly in my way were no problem. The fact that I couldn’t fall asleep after being awake for some twenty plus hours was no problem. I ever so briefly dipped into the Everything is Awful stage when we missed our connecting flight in Beijing but that only lasted about ten minutes. Everything was back to being beautiful while we sat on the airplane.

In the Xianyang airport, my sister and I were up to our ears in Everything is Beautiful or else we would have realized how incredibly stupid we were to get into some stranger’s van. Van! I remember during the forty minute freeway ride thinking about how we might end up murdered and our parents would never know what happened to us, but I sat there smiling. We were in China. China! I was in denial. I was in more denial than I’d ever been in my entire life. It was as if someone had flipped a switch in my head and I couldn’t process what I was going through. For lack of space, I cut the end of my story brief but I will go into a little bit more detail now as I skimmed over my experience with Everything is Awful.

When we left the van and began dragging our bags over campus, we had no idea where we were going. We were surrounded by students but couldn’t seem to find anyone who spoke English. At last, one girl could help us. She was, in fact, a Spanish major. We spoke, the three of us, in our poor Spanish, in China, to try to figure out where we needed to be. She helped us drag our bags over campus as she took us first from the International School building to the hotel on campus where we would be living. We were under the impression at the time, though, that we were supposed to be living in dorms with other international students, and were convinced that we were in the wrong place. We paid the hotel the last of our money that we’d had converted in Las Angeles, in order to get our room keys. We dragged our bags up four flights of stairs and sat, utterly alone, on our hotel beds. We were looking through our phrase books, trying to learn how to ask to be returned to the airport, when our teacher knocked on our door. While we were coping with the Everything is Awful stage, we were using the methods of filter and flex, but were quickly transitioning to flight when our teacher found us. After our teacher found us, and we broke down in tears for a few minutes, we instantly transitioned to Everything is OK and very rarely encountered any other stage again during our entire three and a half month stay in China. I went through all four of Carly Dodd’s culture shock stages in about twenty four hours. After experiencing such intense, albeit brief, culture shock, my sister and I did all we could to attempt to view our surroundings with centricity (Co-Culture) but in only three months it is hard to let go of your outsider perspective. With all of our attempts, we only managed to do some minor deculturation of our American culture and acculturation of our Chinese surroundings. It was an intense three and a half months, to say the least.

Everyone, at one point or another, goes through culture shock. You may experience it on your first day starting at new school or job, but everyone will experience it. If you know in advance that you will be placed in a situation in which you will experience intense culture shock, as in the high of Everything is Beautiful will be extremely high and the low of Everything is Awful will be extremely low, then someone like me who has been there can give you some advice.

1.        Research where you’re going! If you’re going to a foreign country, don’t go entirely devoid of background information. Google some weather stats, read a book on the country’s history, learn some of the language. Anything and everything is more useful to you than going as a blank slate.
2.       Have a backup plan! If you’re going abroad, don’t go empty handed. Be prepared with phone numbers of people you can contact as well as a means in which to do so, so as to avoid sticky situations. (Like getting into a stranger's van.)
3.       Know the signs of culture shock! Again, if you’re going abroad, be prepared. Read up on the symptoms of culture shock. Just as necessary, I believe, is a very basic understanding of how you personally react to stressful situations. If you can recognize how far from your normal stress reaction you’ve wandered you can take action before you overwhelm yourself.