Dear Passenger,
My PST host parents called me today. I spoke with them on the phone for about half an hour and for those thirty minutes in the land of smiles mine was the widest. They said my Thai was getting better and I told them how much I missed them and my host brothers. It makes me laugh now how distant and jarring interacting with them felt initially when I arrived in Suphan Buri and here, only four months later, what a comfort it is to hear their voices on the phone. It’s amazing how quickly we’re able to form bonds when we need to.
As one with the ethos to speak on culture shock, I’ve found this particular transition, specifically the host family dynamic, to be distinctly unique. Up until this point all of my experiences with culture shock have been cushioned by the presence of my family, or not cushioned by its absence, but never has the process been bolstered by a familial proxy.
As such I’ve found the host family dynamic to be very much the inverse of traditional family function, or at least insofar as my own family function. Wherein the traditional setting one feels bonded to a family member through shared experience which in turn informs trustworthiness and reliability, the host family dynamic instead requires the immediate establishment of a seemingly unmerited trust and reliance, which only then later leads to meaningful shared experience.
I think the issue of culture shock in terms of how it presents itself when interacting with one’s host family stems from the tendency to project the characteristics of our biological or chosen family onto our hosts and the subsequent anxieties that occur as a result of the dissonance between these projections and the host family’s true actions and intentions.
The following is an excerpt from the Peace Corps Thai Cultural Handbook section entitled Culture Shock and the Problem of Adjustment to New Cultural Environment in regard to the potentially negative response of the volunteer when faced with substantial cultural difference:
“It is then that the second stage begins, characterized by a hostile and aggressive attitude towards the host country. This hostility evidently grows out of the genuine difficulty with the individual experiences in the process of adjustment … the result, ‘I just don’t like them’. You become aggressive. You band together with your fellow countrymen and criticize the host country, its way and its people. But this criticism is the not an objective appraisal, but a derogatory one. Instead of trying to account for conditions as they are through an honest analysis of the actual conditions and the historical circumstances which have created them, you talk as if the difficulties you experienced are more or less created by the people of the host country, for your special discomfort.”
Sound familiar? Probably not because you can’t see a mountain from its peak and you’re standing squarely on the shoulders of the Goddess Mother of Mountains, but if you could see what I see, if you could see yourself through my eyes, dear Passenger, you’d see a man who couldn’t handle the stripping away of the familiar cultural cues of which he was accustomed; a man who rather than make a concerted effort to dig deep and understand a culture vastly different from his own, grew hostile and bitter internalizing the mantra “the ways of the host country are bad because they make me feel bad.”
Well, if yet another exhibit is to be added to the vast preexisting showcase that illustrates the stark dissimilarity between you and I, let it be this. My host family, both here at my permanent site and during Pre-Service Training in Suphan Buri, has been nothing if not a safety net, and I know had it not been for them PST, and my future service on the whole, would have been/will be that much more of struggle. Every day I look forward to coming home from work and answering the never-ending stream of What is this in English? questions that are brought to me by my host brother and sister, showing pictures of my friends and family back home to my host grandmother, and sharing my motivations and aspirations with my host parents as well as hearing their own.
You declaimed me of the people of Thailand, sermonized me on how unwelcoming you thought they were, of how backwards you felt their culture seemed to be.
“I just didn’t like it” you said to me verbatim when I asked you why.
But here I am, and as consistently as ever you continue to be dead wrong.
Sincerely,
Ian Tramm
PCV 131