Culture shocked.

I’ve been gone 6 months and I thought I had managed to escape this rather uncomfortable state of being. I was wrong. After convincing myself that I’d been slowly losing my mind over the past 4 weeks, I accidentally came across some information on culture shock.

My perception of culture shock was always this sudden onset, overwhelmed feeling of standing on the street an hour after stepping off an airplane in some exotic land thinking, “Holy shit. This isn’t _______ (insert hometown here)”, much like I did upon arrival in Saigon. The thing about that feeling is that you get over pretty it quickly, and 2 minutes later you’re enthralled by your surroundings, gawking at everything like you’re a kid in a candy store. This is not culture shock.

Culture shock is late onset and doesn’t happen to any random traveler. Only those who choose to put down roots in a foreign culture and manage to do this for at least a few months will experience culture shock in its true form. It’s characterized by the following:

- Idealization of the homeland
- Negative stereotyping of the host culture and its people
- Obsession with cleanliness
- Excessive irritability
- Insomnia
- Insecurity
- And lots of other fun things…

I’d say it probably started with insecurity. All of a sudden I realized that I had no clue how to understand the social cues here, and I was constantly aware of what I was/wasn’t doing and how the Taiwanese were reacting to me. I always felt like I was doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and that everyone was looking at me thinking things like “stupid foreigner” and “get the hell out of my country”.

Not so much.

This then led to the negative stereotyping, which I won’t go into with any further detail because I’m entirely aware of what an ass it makes me to walk into a country that has been so welcoming and think such negative things. Glad to say the negative stereotyping has since passed.

The negative stereotyping segued into irritability, where every minor aggravation seemed 10 times bigger than what it really was. You all should’ve been flies on the wall in my brain for a day. My patience had far surpassed the point of unforgiving, but thankfully this never went any further than my own internal dialogue. It’s hard to jump off your scooter in a giant intersection and express your rage on the idiot who’s conveniently chosen the ONLY 3 feet of open space in which you could make a right turn to rummage in her purse, find her ringing cell phone, and proceed to answer it. At a green light. I’m still not over that.

The obsession with cleanliness has been a gradual thing, but yah, I’m probably borderline OCD. I wash my hands a minimum of 10 times a day, partly because I spend the majority of my waking hours with hundreds of germ filled little monsters, partly because I see too many cockroaches not to, and partly because I’m constantly freaked out that I’ve touched something foreign and gross that will soon end up in my eye.

Insomnia has been a less than fun side effect of all this. Over the past few weeks I’ve been lucky to fall asleep before 4 or 5am, but thankfully this is finally changing, as is everything else. Now that I’ve pinned down the cause of my insomnia, road rage, and obsessive-compulsive hand washing, I’m happy to report it’s all fading away.