Shock- the shaky and shapeless shadow that had one year ago enveloped me in its
dreaded embrace, and is still today reluctant to let me go. I was not prepared to
greet this unwelcome visitor, even when I knew that Charlottesville, Virginia was
the antithesis of Bangkok, Thailand. Why should I have been prepared? I spoke the
language, I attended an American school, I had been to America before, and by the
Thai students at my high school and even by my own family, I was considered
completely and hopelessly “Americanized”. Little did I know, I was to feel more Thai
while living in the United States than I ever had while living in my own home
country.
To be honest, I was mesmerized by Charlottesville when I first arrived. Gone was
the trash that soiled the streets of Bangkok, gone was the smog that tarnished the
skies of my city and gone was the makeshift stalls and carts of street vendors that
crowded the sidewalks. America was a liberating change. Never before had trees
been greener, flowers more vibrant, or skies more blue. As winter rolled around,
the image of a silent UVa campus sleeping under a thin layer of snow was the most
spectacular I had ever seen.
However, the lust that I had for America rapidly evaporated, and the shock that had
not registered with me earlier soon caught up. I realized that what I knew for
certain did not go far beyond the knowledge of my own name and my country of
birth. I had known that I wanted to become a lawyer, and that a higher education in
the United States would provide me with more possibilities than I could ever have
studying in Thailand. However, as I started my new life in this foreign country, I felt
like I was blindly stumbling and fumbling through my undergraduate career, failing
miserably to locate the path that would lead me towards the reason why I was even
here in the first place. I knew where I wanted to be, but I had no idea how to get
there.
My life as a whole had become as shaky and shapeless as the shock that had staked
its claim upon me. Every morning I woke up feeling exhaustingly unhappy, and
every night I went to sleep thinking about home. I did not understand this new
environment that I was living in. The smallest details baffled me. Why did America
create inches and miles when there already existed a perfectly functioning metric
system? Why is the dime smaller than the nickel, and why does each coin not have a
numerical label?
Though, out of all the unprecedented problems that I now faced, my biggest one was
the Americans. Strangely, what bothered me the most about Americans could be
summed up by the one single question of: “How are you?” This question, or rather
this guise of a question, to me symbolized and confirmed my theory on Americans
that I had, by that point, sculpted, polished and placed in the center of my mind:
Americans were fake. In Thailand, it was natural to give a sincere response when a
person is asked how he or she is doing, a response that tended to be more than a
one word answer. However, in America, time after time I stopped to answer this
question only to find that my inquirer was already disappearing down the street or
ducking into a hallway. When I would commence my own “how are you?” I would be
met with nothing more than a passing glance or smile. I found it unfathomable and
offensive. In my mind, there was no other explanation for such behavior other than
the fact that Americans were fake. As my weariness of Americans grew, I came to
realize that my fluency in English was now of miniscule use. Even if I was able speak
the language like an American, I was not able to think like one. When I conversed
with an American, many times I would feel as if there were a wall between us, one
through which I could see but could only hear a muffled voice.
I was pulled out of my stupor by one single word: “Cultural”. The realization of this
term disillusioned me from my judgment of Americans. It explains the phenomenon
that I was going through of why people from one society or country can behave in
ways that are incomprehensible and even irritating to others that come from a
different place. It is not that Americans are fake, but how they think and how they
act is simply cultural. Actually, “How are you?” means “Hello” in America, a fact that
took me a long time to realize.
Like how being in America has disillusioned me, I trust my being in America has
disillusioned some Americans. Hopefully, anyone who I have met in America so far
realizes that Thailand is not some strange, backward country where people live in
huts and send their children off to school on elephants. In fact, the new generation
of Thais is not much different from that of other developing countries. This
generation is an English-speaking breed whose members have set high academic
and professional for themselves. They are scattered throughout different countries,
receiving higher education abroad, representing where they come from and
disproving others’ generalizations while having their own challenged.
I am part of this generation. Like many others, I have traveled here to America to
achieve something for my family, my country and myself. For me, the impact of
contact is a harsh and unpredictable learning experience, but one that I know is an
inevitable part of studying abroad. I do not believe the strength of the impact ever
fully disappears no matter how long we study abroad students have been in the host
country. It is a constant, one that we have to appreciate the value of, and at the
same time not let fog up the reason for why are here.
Teresa Poonsuwan