Anticipating Culture Shock

I have not strayed far from my country, though I've wanted to. I spent a month in Spain, another in Italy, a week in Mexico, and long ago, when I was seven, a month in Israel. The Fulbright organizers tell us we will be following a culture shock curve that begins in a honeymoon fervor that falls to despair and rises again in a period of adjustment. Because I have traveled so little, I think I stayed in the honeymoon phase in most cases, except in Spain when I was about done with paella and gazpacho.

On the other hand, I did have a moment of discomfort in Italy with the clown who undressed me in a crowded piazza, and before this as a seven year old in Israel, when I thought exploding a bag in a bank in Tel Aviv would be funny though this turned out not to be so.

Nevertheless, I have had experiences with apart-ness. What comes to mind right now is my job over summers during college as a nurse aide in a nursing home. The residents were so institutionalized and the caretakers seemed to be equally so, lining up the wheelchairs in the hallway an hour before meals and treating life functions as so much machinery. There were layers to the culture shock too. I was the only white worker in the place, and families frequently approached me during sickness or death and called me doctor. Also, I spent a lot of time flirting with a Filipina woman, until one day the activity director her brother called me into his office to tell me that, back in the Philippines, his family was involved with a mob and there was violence like I wouldn't believe; like, he said, if someone were to be messing with your sister, for example, we'd get a group of guys and we'd mess him up. Here's how I dealt with my culture shock in this particular instance: Oh, I said. During the other aspects of this culture shock, the routines seemed endless, the bare tasks of humanity utterly surreal. I responded by trying to learn to be as efficient as others seemed to be, but also trying to make eye and verbal contact as directly and as often as I could, to keep humanity right there in bold. And I kept flirting, which was something that crossed several boundaries at once.

Anticipating what might be stressful or culturally different to a visitor of America, meanwhile, is perhaps even more difficult to imagine right now. That's part of what makes this whole journey so powerful and interesting -- not just that we are going to learn about other cultures, but that we are going to discover our own.

So here I am, trying to imagine stress points for internationals in America, and I think about general stress points, like traffic, or shopping malls.

Here's something a visitor in America can use. In the United States, the customer is always right. If you want to be treated like a queen, go pretend you're going to buy something expensive, like a car. Salespeople will bend over backwards for you, at least until they think you're ready to buy something. Some stores even have professional greeters, there at the door to welcome you (and to make you uncomfortable if you planned to do any shoplifting). If you don't like something you bought, you can often say so and return it.

This attitude often extends into the classroom. Some politicians and instructional leaders and parents view schools as a business where students or student learning is The Product and parents -- by virtue of tax contributions -- are Customers; some of these parents, rightly or wrongly but often rightly, may feel that they have not had good returns on their tax dollars: they may feel that their children have had lousy experiences in our schools. In such cases, "the customer is always right" can lead to some very demanding parents.

But, as Tibor said in our conversation whose title was, "Things I'm afraid to tell you," smiles are universally warming, and kindness, patience and understanding can make a big difference in the case of such encounters.

Still, the pervasiveness of business as a cultural model runs deep in our country. Take for example, the following two terms: “At the end of the day.” “Bottom line.”

Both of these highly American expressions are about focusing in on a final result instead of the messy processes that lead to it. In any kind of tension between the means and ends, these experessions emphasize that the means are not really important. People voice them when others are spending too much energy on trivial things like precedent, ethics, or feelings.

All this is to say, at the end of the day, I can write and plan and reflect; but I know nothing of cultural shock as of yet.

A Literary Point of View

I have now picked up a few pieces of literature from Hungary, as recommended by a dear family friend; and if this is a true sampling, this is a bleak body of literature. Valerie, if you’re reading this, did you recognize the empty hole of loneliness and disconnection at the center of these works?

The first is an allegorical novel called Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy (1999), a magical realist work in which a man on his way to a linguistics convention finds himself in an unintended stopover in a crowded city where no one speaks a language in any way recognizable, even to the linguist, and word patterns remain elusive, while everyone everywhere is thronging and rude. This reminds me of a Kazuo Ishiguro book called The Unconsoled, where a man goes through daily routines with a benumbed insomnia. Is it a coincidence that this book too takes place in central Europe, or that its first location is a Hungarian café? In any event, on the jacket, events of Metropole are described this way: “One claustrophobic day blurs into another as [the main character] desperately struggles to survive in this vastly overpopulated metropolis where there are as many languages as there are people.”

Another novel, which will be much more fun according to Stephanie, is Dezsö Kosztolányi’s Skylark (1930). The context of this novel is described this way: “Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.” One can’t help but draw a line between the unremitting tedium in one book and the aphasic linguist pushing his way through hectic mobs in the other.

Finally, a book of poems by János Pilinszky (Selected Poems, translated by Ted Hughes and János Csokits, 1976) gives voice to an even more tangible despair. Here are a sampling of three of the less violent poems that I find, in the first two cases, beautiful, and in the last, hilarious:

“By the Time You Come”

I am alone. And by the time you come

I shall be the only one still alive.

Just feathers in an empty roost.

Stars instead of a sky.

In my orphanage, unburied,

as on a wintry dump

picking among the rubbish

I keep finding scraps of my life.

And that will be flawless peace.

Even my heart inaudible.

All around me the ecstatic

barriers of silence.

Naked eternity.

And yours, simply yours.

A majestic simplicity

made for you, from the first day.

Like a lumpish basketwork dummy

time just sits, without a word.

Desire has no longer any limbs.

It has only a gasping trunk.

By the time you come I shall have lost everything.

No house, no soft bed.

I shall be able to lie undisturbed

in a bleak ecstasy.

Only you must not rob me, you must not desert me.

If you are weak, that is the end of me.

And horrible, to awake, in a bed

among pillows, hearing the noise of the street.

“The Desert of Love”

A bridge, and a hot concrete road—

the day is emptying its pockets,

laying out, one by one, all its possessions.

You are quite alone in the catatonic twilight.

A landscape like the bed of a wrinkled pit,

with glowing scars, a darkness which dazzles.

Dusk thickens. I stand numb with brightness

blinded by the sun. The summer will not leave me.

Summer. And the flashing heat.

The chickens stand, like burning cherubs,

in the boarded-up, splintered cages.

I know their wings do not even tremble.

Do you still remember? First there was the wind.

And then the earth. Then the cage.

Flames, dung. And now and again

a few wing-flutters, a few empty reflexes.

And thirst. I asked for water—

Even today I hear that feverish gulping,

and helplessly, like a stone, bear

and quench the mirages.

Years are passing. And years. And hope

is like a tin-cup toppled into the straw.

“Fable”

Detail from his KZ_Oratorio: Dark Heaven

Once upon a time

there was a lonely wolf

lonelier than the angels.

He happened to come to a village.

He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls

the caresses of its bricklayers.

But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.

Apart from God nobody ever

found them so beautiful

as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.

He stopped in the middle of the room

and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes

and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.