Culture Shock The United States of America is a country in which many people
from all over the world comes to live harmoniously with each other. Unlike
Canada, which is a multicultural country, it is a melting pot since each person
brings his peculiarity to enrich the culture of this country. But this melting
process is not always without pain or hurt. I felt the life in Canada is more
comfortable According to John J. Macionis, the author of Sociology, secondary
Canadian edition. Culture shock is a state of bewilderment, anxiety,
disorientation and distress as an individual suddenly exposed to a social or
cultural environment radically different from his own. It happens frequently for
the international students and immigrants.
Culture conflicts appear not only when students come to school and learn new
ways of living there, but also when they come back home and live with their own
families or their own societies. The reason for that is the students are young
and easy to change, but the adults are not ready to follow their example and
adapt to the new situation. When I first come to live in the states, my system
of values must change in order for me to survive.
When I first came to the states, I was unprepared to live there, that's why I
always suffer from stress because of culture shock. I feel that student-teacher
relationships in North American are not the same as they were in Hong Kong. Hong
Kong students often have high regard for their teachers. In Hong Kong, students
never call their teacher by their first name, because it is not respectful to
the teacher. Also, they hesitate to ask or to answer questions in class because
they don't want to lose their face in showing their ignorance in front of the
class, and sometimes because their English is not good enough to form a clear
question. And if they give the wrong answer it not only humiliates them but also
brings shame on their families.
Hong Kong students were taught to be modest and not to display their
knowledge freely until being specially called for. All these things can lead to
misunderstanding since my teachers thought that I was too shy, or stupid, or
abnormal. Sometimes when being directly asked for some questions, unlike
American students, which are more creative and can always give a fast answer, I
have to take a long time to think the question over, because I was afraid to
give the incorrect answer.
Teachers often feel uncomfortable with my silence and tend to interpret my
silence as an indicator of my inability to answer a question. It's a normal
thing that American teachers expect Asian students to ask them to explain
something difficult. However, Hong Kong students don't do this as we have seen
earlier. Moreover, their feedback sometimes leads to more misunderstanding.
When teachers see their students listen to them in smiling or in head
nodding, they imagine that these students understand the subject very well. In
reality, some students mask their emotions and just act like that to be polite,
since they think that if they would ask question, the teachers would be hurt for
their teaching was not clear enough for the class.
I was having low expectation from the teacher at that time and that affects
my learning. I was stressed and felt disorientation all the time in school. Many
teachers do not treat their minority learners as intelligent students, and
perhaps as a result, their minority students fail in their classes (Scarcella,
139). In Hong Kong, students stay in the same classroom with a fixed seat
everyday in a same year while their teachers come to their class to teach them.
Therefore, students can have many friends who always do the same things with
them. This helped to build a more close and stable relationship between
students. Students are more interdependent. What are important is not me but we.
In America, the people are more individualistic. People only pursue their own
personal achievement and fulfillment. Relationships between people are often
many but temporary or casual. I felt people only care about themselves and I
felt that they are very selfish. At that time I always felt lost and lonely
because I felt it is difficult to find a good friend to talk to. Relationship
are always causal, no one would even cares about you. People in different
culture usually have different values. In speaking with friends, I had
misunderstanding too.
