BY AMY HO
Staff Blogger
Monday, March 25, 2013
I spent a month last summer in Budapest living with
Hungarians and people from other cultures. I spent the last weekend living in a
hotel room and interacting pretty much solely with Indians, some of whom
actually live in India. Yet somehow, despite not understanding Hungarian or any
Bollywood references, the biggest culture shock of my life has still been
coming here to Yale.
I’ve had a relatively American upbringing: I was born and
raised in the United States, in a small suburb in New Jersey, and I went to
public school. My parents weren’t tiger parents; I was allowed to go to
sleepovers, and nobody ever sat across the table from me to watch me and make
sure I did my homework.
At the same time, however, my first language is Mandarin
Chinese. Because my parents were too busy with work, my maternal grandparents
took me back to China with them when I was only a year old. We returned after a
year and a half, but made regular months-long trips back to the “Mother
Country” every summer. Beyond constantly returning to China, I lived with my
immigrant parents and maternal grandparents at home, which meant that our
household primarily spoke Chinese instead of English. Once I started attending
school, I spoke English during the day with my classmates and teachers, but
came home to Chinese language and Chinese food. Even at school, because of
advanced placement and honors classes, more than half of the people I regularly
interacted with were also Chinese American. I also attended Chinese school on
Saturdays, and my dance, art, and music teachers were all Chinese.
This pattern of being an American for barely a third of my
time and then being Chinese the rest of the time lasted from when I was five
until I came to Yale. Suddenly, I was American 24/7.
The culture shock didn’t set in until a couple of months
into first semester. College was such a completely new experience that the lack
of Mandarin being spoken (I didn’t take a language class) and the absence of
Chinese food were not terribly noticeable in and of themselves. It wasn’t until
I got used to the schedule of classes, extracurricular activities, homework,
and social life that I realized how much I missed using chopsticks, playing
Chinese chess, and snacking on dried fruits.
Upon this realization, I began trying to reconcile my strong
sense of nationalism and cultural pride with my very American lifestyle—which
resulted in yet another culture shock, this time when I went home for spring
break. Because my uncle and cousin had just immigrated to America from China a
few weeks ago and were living with us, the household was more culturally
Chinese than it had ever been before. I hadn’t spoken Mandarin in months,
resulting in forgotten phrases and grammatical rules. I didn’t know how to
explain my college life in a way that would allow my family to relate, a
difference in lifestyle that was made all the more clear when one of my non-Asian
college friends came to visit for a few days.
To be honest, I’m still struggling with how to combine my
cultural heritage with living in America. It’s a constant process of
rediscovery and cultural discomfort as I realize that there is no comfortable
medium, no way in which I will not feel like an outsider in both cultures at
one point or another. While this sounds really depressing, the key, then, is to
appreciate the merging of cultures and constant opportunity for growth.
I’m not quite there yet, but I’m working on it. In the
meanwhile, I’ll be teaching all my friends how to play Chinese chess.
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