Culture Fatigue

So the other day, I was talking with one of my classmates. Assignments for our projects are coming up, so we have to get working on them. But it’s hard, as my classmate and I seemed to agree that we didn’t want to get started. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to do the projects, it’s just that we felt so fatigued from our workday, that doing the projects feels like more a burden for each passing day.

Then it hit me.

There was a stage that we were MISSING all ALONG.

In the traditional view of the cycle of cultural personality shift when moving to a new country, the phases are thus:

1. Culture Appreciation

2. Culture Shock

3. Culture Adaptation

Let’s examine each of these in turn.

1. Culture Appreciation.

When you first arrive in a new country, you’re hyper-aware of your surroundings. You make sure that you do your best not to offend anyone in the new country that you are in. After all, you’re a visitor to their country, right? They are letting you be here, so you should learn everything you can about their culture so that you can live and thrive in it. Righttttt?

2. Culture Shock.

After about a month, it hits you that you’re HERE TO STAY. You start to panic. Have you adapted enough? The stress of living in a foreign culture and having to eat rice EVERY DAY for EVERY MEAL is starting to get to you. You sneak in using a fork wherever you can. Trips to McDonald’s become more frequent. Far more frequent. On the subway, you get nervous when you realize you’re the only white person on the train. In America, you wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Carly Rae Jepson, but now you know every word to “Call Me Maybe” imagining seeing the guy from the music video when in reality the closest you’ve seen to him was the balding 60-year-old Russian guy just because he was the only guy you’ve seen today who WASN’T Chinese.

4. Culture Adaptation.

You’ve accepted that people here do things differently than you’re used to, and that’s okay. You can use either chopsticks or a fork-and-knife. You go to the restaurant that gives you the best value, regardless of whether it’s American or Chinese. You don’t even notice the stares anymore, and you stop panicking whenever there’s people around you talking in Chinese and you can’t quite understand what they’re saying.

But there was a part we were MISSING this ENTIRE TIME.

3. Culture Fatigue.

Culture fatigue is a stage beyond culture shock, which is indicated by a general reclusiveness of the individual from the new culture back into familiar territory by surrounding themselves with their home culture. It’s the point where the sheer exhaustion from culture shock pushes the outsider to adapt a new persona which they would not normally use otherwise. Culture fatigue is defined by not shock, but a sort of anger, contempt of the individual for the society in which they currently reside. It can take many forms, such as badmouthing native residents for the cultural identities that were appreciated in stage 1, or further rationalization of cultural shock tendencies, (such as “I don’t go to McDonalds because I want Western Food, but because all of the Chinese restaurants are terrible,” “Chinese pop music is so terrible,” “None of the stores ever have anything I need.”)

Of course, it’s important to bear in mind that oftentimes the different stages can overlap in unexpected ways. It’s not a clear progression from stage 1 to stage 4 in all dimensions of cultural shift. Rather, these things manifest themselves differently in different areas. For example, someone can become used to eating Chinese food, but still not be able to adapt to the transportation system, and can become great at talking to native Chinese people, but still hate going shopping at Chinese stores.

As for me? Personally, in food, I went from Stage 1 to Stage 4 in China practically instantly.

Shopping? Stage 3.

Still can’t find 3x5 cards or a proper notebook ANYWHERE.

Ugh. Or brown socks. Those gosh darn hard to find brown socks, seriously, does no one in China wear brown socks? I can find gray and black socks and white socks, but brown socks? Nooooooo. I guess people in China just don’t wear brown pants. You’re either wearing black pants and are part of the financial elite or you’re part of the losers of the economic growth wearing second-hand clothes. China has such a big problem with the wealth gap, so much more so than in the US. There’s just not the middle-class you see in the US…

But ANYWAY,

That's life in the Middle Country.