When most people open up their closets in the morning, they usually ignore the out-of-style shirts on the edge, the wrong-color sweaters, the too-tight pants. Instead, as much as they can, they grab something that looks right, something that fits right, something that feels right.
When you transition between countries, your cultural closets get switched. Your choices become limited, and you often have to put on things you’d rather not wear. You’ve given up comfort for other purposes. Some of this discomfort is just an annoyance, like a scratchy tag inside the collar of your shirt. But some can seem unworkable, like that same shirt two sizes too small.
It’s the Water and the Dirt
When I and my family moved overseas, we weren’t surprised by culture stress. We may not have been fully prepared, but we weren’t surprised. What did surprise us, though, was that we couldn’t always identify the causes of our irritation and pain.
For many stressors, you know just what hook to hang them on. Singing at church feels a little off? It’s because everybody’s clapping on a different beat than you are. Can’t sleep? That’s because of the all-night traffic outside your window. Nagging cough? Pollution.
Being able to name a problem helps us sort things out. It gives us vocabulary for talking about it with others. It helps us better understand our new home and ourselves. It helps us find solutions. It helps us cope.
But sometimes, there is no hook, at least not an obvious one.
A few months after we landed in Taipei, my wife developed a “cold,” a cold that lasted on and off for over a year. Our doctor couldn’t find a solution and none of his remedies helped (one medicine caused her heart to race). Finally, he diagnosed her with shui tu bu fu, which can be translated as “not acclimated to the water and soil.” That’s odd, because we didn’t drink the water, and with all the concrete, and we rarely saw the soil.
Shui tu bu fu may have been the most accurate description for her illness, but it wasn’t very comforting. For us it had a simple meaning: we can’t explain it, and the only cure is getting used to Taiwan. (Add vague diagnoses to our cultural stressors.)
Over time, she did get better, but it’s hard to suffer without knowing the cause. With culture stress, even when a cure isn’t evident, we’d like to know the why. Without the why, it can start to seem, at least to others, that the symptoms aren’t real. A tombstone that reads “I told you I was sick” is hardly a victory.
Heavy Pockets
Culture stress is cumulative over time. That’s one of the reasons I prefer the term culture stress over culture shock. To me, culture shock brings up images of being brought to your knees by a great weight—for example, an enormous wool coat with its pockets full of bricks. Culture stress includes that heavy coat and also a jacket with a pebble added to its pockets each day. Bricks are obvious; pebbles, not always, but they can weigh you down just the same.
Of course, not every feeling of frustration or malaise is caused by culture stress. Often, we bring our own ill-fitting wardrobe with us and adjusting to a new setting brings that to the forefront.
Sometimes our feelings come from a combination of multiple causes, with or without identifiable hooks, and at times, they can seem overwhelming. If everything rubs you the wrong way and you find yourself having an “I hate (insert name of host country here) day,” don’t beat yourself up. You’re not alone. It happens. Also, understand that those days are equal opportunity when it comes to place. You may find yourself having an “I hate (insert name of passport country here) day,” too. Reverse culture stress is equally real—and can be equally frustrating to pinpoint.
In whatever form, culture stress is normal. So is it normal to be faced with confusion when going through it. Give yourself time. Give grace to your host culture, and use the same grace for yourself. That time and grace will change you. They will give you the ability to tolerate, accept, and embrace, and to be able to say, “I love this place!”
The Aches of This World
London-born author Tahir Shah makes his living writing about travel and crossing cultures. In his book In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams, he tells about his life after moving to a dilapidated mansion in a Casablanca shantytown. He writes,
Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can’t imagine life without them.
This is the goal when one makes a new country home, this feeling of shoelessness, but it’s not always possible. Some pinches we never get used to, and some we shouldn’t. We should never become comfortable with gross injustices: racism, human trafficking, child abuse, and the like. We want to get rid of the feeling of different, but the pains and the aches are needful reminders that all is not right, and this regardless of the earthly locale. As Paul writes, “Our citizenship is in heaven,” not in this world.
Paul’s writing also shows us that “wearing” our home is an idea that should not be foreign to Christians. In 2 Corinthians, Paul says,
For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.
“We groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling.” This move goes beyond new clothes for our bodies, it necessitates new bodies for our souls. So if on earth we are not comfortable even in our own skins, how can we expect to be completely comfortable in the trappings of any culture?
Someday when we put on heaven, we’ll truly be home. There will be no more groaning, no more culture stress, no more painful shoes, no more stiff collars, no more weighted pockets . . . and no more need for hooks.
(Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams, Bantam, 2008; Philippians 3:20, 2 Corinthians 5:1-5, NIV)
[photo: “038,” by glassghost, used under a Creative Commons license]
