Tag Archives: culture shock

Asian American, Cultural Exchange, culture, Family, Identity, New Experience

What It Means to be Asian American

By Sarah Ta

[3 minute read]

My identity has always been something that I could never quite pin down. When I was younger, I believed that I knew myself inside and out, and thought I could predict what my future self would be like. As I’ve gotten older and just a little bit wiser, I can say for certain that my past self was wrong. I am constantly changing and even if I continue to use the same terms to describe myself, those terms hold an entirely different meaning to me now than they did five years ago. One of those terms is “Asian American”.

While I have always known that I was Asian and identified as such, I didn’t feel the need to specify that I was also American. After all, I knew I was born in the United States and since most of my elementary classmates were as well, it was just something we all accepted. It wasn’t until I moved the summer before 7th grade when the need to specify that I was American came about. I went from a predominantly Asian school to a predominantly Hispanic/Latino school and suddenly, me being American was no longer a given. It took several months of being questioned about whether I was born here and what my ethnicity was before things finally settled down and everyone moved on with their lives. However, their questioning left me more unsure of my own identity than I would have liked to admit. Just identifying as Asian no longer felt adequate enough, but with my limited vocabulary and knowledge, I pushed my small identity crisis aside and continued on with my carefree middle school days.

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

It wasn’t until high school that I discovered the term Asian American. By then, my little identity crisis had been almost forgotten. I don’t remember how I came across the term, but once I did, it was like a light bulb had lit up inside my head. That was the term that I had been unconsciously searching for since middle school, and finding it was like finding the missing piece to my identity puzzle. While I continue to identify as Asian American, the meaning of that term has changed since then. Being Asian American used to mean that while my ancestry was Asian, I was born here and so that made me American. There was a clear line between those two categories, but I just happened to be in both. Now, I realize that there is no line. Being Asian American is a melting pot of many different experiences and it is not something that can be easily separated into nice, neat categories. Even though it can be a confusing mess at times, it is one that I have never been more proud to be a part of, and every day I am learning more about my culture and how my identity shapes who I am.

Featured Image by Christina Boemio on Unsplash

Sarah is an undergraduate student from the San Gabriel Valley studying GeoDesign. In her free time, she enjoys reading, exploring L.A., trying new foods, and of course, meeting new people. She can speak conversational Cantonese, and is currently learning Mandarin. Even though her Chinese is limited, that doesn’t stop her from striking up a conversation with other international students. 

Advice, Cultural Exchange, culture, Language, Outlook

Taking English for Granted

By David Schroeder

[4 minute read]

Language is not something I really think about on a day-to-day basis. Most of the time, I just go through my day freely communicating with ease and not running into any language-related problems. I feel like this is the way a lot of native English speakers living in America feel, and I’ve found that it is a very ignorant way of thinking. Everyone should acknowledge that being fluent in English is a major privilege that is often overlooked or taken for granted by native speakers.

During my first conversation session at ALI, I was talking with an international student specifically about what our high schools were like. He said that he had a few required classes that he had to take during high school, and that one of them was four years of English. I mentioned that I was also required to take a foreign language and my conversation partner was puzzled by this, and he questioned me on why I would be required to learn any other language besides English. This forced me to step back and think more deeply about English.

spark

My conversation partner’s statement is sad but true, because in a practical sense, if you know English, there is not a need to know any other language because of English’s dominance in the world. This is unfortunate, because it is not fair to rate languages above each other because it creates a big disadvantage to those who are not native English speakers, and thus they are given the burden of learning another language (usually English) out of necessity.

Continue reading Taking English for Granted →
Asian American, culture, Family, Food, Language, Travel

“Reverse” Culture Shock

By Stephen Kim

“Home.”

This simple word has always been tough for me to understand. For the first 12 years of my life, “home” was right here in Southern California. I was born here in Los Angeles in a Korean-American household and grew up in a small suburban city for most of my childhood. Then everything changed in 2006 when our family decided to move to Indonesia, a distant country halfway around the world. In leaving America, I was leaving my “home,” my friends, my extended family, American culture, American food, and an American lifestyle.

By this time I was just about to start seventh grade in a completely new surrounding. I was completely unaware of the language, culture, geography, and lifestyle of this new environment. But in almost no time at all, I quickly adjusted to my new life in Indonesia. Our international school required us to take Indonesian language classes and after two years of language courses, I could say that I was comfortable speaking the language and could get around the city and partake in everyday conversational dialogue. I also met some amazing people there who would become some of my closest friends. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t a big fan of the food at first, but a few years into it, I learned to love it. We also got to know our local neighbors who taught us Indonesian manners and way of life. In no time at all, Indonesia had become my “home” away from “home.”

In 2012, I graduated from my international school and came back to the States for college. After finally feeling like Indonesia had become my home, I had to leave. I had to leave all my best friends, the food that I had begun to love, and the slow-paced lifestyle that living in Indonesia had to offer. I got on the plane and a couple days later landed at LAX. I was finally “home” again. But it felt so unfamiliar, like I was in a new place. It didn’t feel like the same place I grew up in for the first 12 years of my life. Trying to re-adjust, I realized that my old friends all changed. The trends were all different. Everything about the life I remembered was vastly different. Just when I could comfortably call Indonesia “home,” I had to come back to America, to a place where my original “home” didn’t feel like it.

And this is what I like to call “reverse” culture shock. It was culture shock in the sense that it was this feeling of disorientation that I experienced when I was suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture or way of life. It was “reverse” in the sense that “home” didn’t feel like “home” again. It should have been a place of security, familiarity, and comfort, but I felt confused and lost. The hardest part of it all was that no one could relate to the things I was feeling. It was hard to find people who could empathize with me.

After much reflection, a revelation hit me. Rather than always asking, “Where is home?” a more appropriate question is “How can I feel at home?” or “How can I make this place my home?” If home indeed is where the heart is, then how can I put my heart into the situation I’m in now? How can I devote my time learning its way of life and its culture? How can I invest my life into the relationships I have here? As Maya Angelou so eloquently puts it, “I long, as every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.”

Featured image by Heni Tanseri on Pexels

Graduated from USC and was a one-on-one conversation partner while he was a student.