Living abroad is not just about discovering new places or people, but also learning about your own country and culture.
I came to San Jose from France on August 13, 2021, and I’ve learned more about my country by leaving for one year than I would’ve by staying inside.
Studying abroad shouldn’t be the privilege that it is now. Students around the world should be more financially supported and motivated by their universities to leave their homes, because they would build a better understanding of where they’re from.
After more than 20 years in the same country, some may normalize thousands of cultural habits that most residents wouldn’t even think about.
They just think, “That is how life is and that’s it.”
Those traveling outside of their country for long periods of time may realize that their own cultural habits are not universal.
I’m not talking about traveling for a few days or weeks, because in this case you keep your way of life and thinking in your bags. You’re just moving them with you and keeping an outsider’s vision of your environment, which pushes you to admire anything new as long as it’s different from your home. You put your criticism to the side and work on your touristic experience to make it fun anyway.
This is not the type of travel I’m talking about.
I’m talking about settling down for months, opening your bags and deconstructing the way you were raised to think. By trying to fit in with unfamiliar surroundings, you’re forced to confront what you’re used to in your home country, from the food you eat to your relationships.
I’ve always thought rampant cigarette smoking was an inaccurate French stereotype, until I noticed how I rarely see young Americans smoking them. It made me realize how smoking was trivialized in my home country, and how young people start there.
I’ve always thought university professors were people you had to keep an important hierarchical distance with until I started studying at San Jose State and saw how the relationships between students and professors could be more collaborative.
I also quickly learned in my experience abroad that humor also changes with each country. Sarcasm and irony are pretty usual where I’m from, and I’ve felt that being sarcastic could lead to a lot of funny misunderstandings in the U.S. I believed every word or idea could be translated from my language to English, and then realized some French words didn’t have an “English twin.”
For example, in a study published in 2014, Jianjun Wang and Sunihan Sunihan from Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia in the north of China, analyzed the untranslatability between English and Chinese from an intercultural perspective. They said in the introduction of their research that “Language is of course translatable to some extent, while we should not neglect the basic fact that there are still a lot of phenomena showing that untranslatability can be seen and exist in intercultural communication.”
Canadian anthropologist Kalervo Oberg theorized the idea of “culture shock” in 1954, as a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety that affects people immersed in cultures unfamiliar to them, according to the Longwood University website. Oberg said culture adjustment can be frustrating when individuals focus on the negative aspects of cultural differences, according to the same website.
Culture shock can easily lead people to rank what they are familiar with as something more “normal” than what they discover in another area, putting one custom “above” another.
Because we consider what we’re used to as our norm, culture shocks may cause people to have a judgemental approach to cultural differences and reject them, perceiving different habits as “weird” or “too strange.”
Rather than developing a negative perspective of U.S. characteristics, I gained more knowledge about what could be my country's identity each time I felt disoriented when I faced a cultural gap. At each moment of cultural shock, I felt how my biases affected my perception of what was universal to human nature and what’s not.
Growing up in a globalized world made me think culture shock was an old-fashioned concept that was no longer relevant in Western countries including the U.S. and my home country. After spending eight months in San Jose, I can say I was wrong and perhaps ignorant to think this way.
Studying abroad is an opportunity that should be accessible for students to allow them to discover what they thought they already knew: their home.
