Good grief, what a week. I staggered off the plane around 9:30 Monday night, which according to my biological understanding of time should have been 10:30 Tuesday morning, spent the night in Little Rock, drove to New Orleans, saw my sister, drove back to Harrison, spent the night, drove to Arrow Rock to see my brother, spent the night, drove back to Harrison. I am BEAT, I’ve got a cold, and the best two cats in the entire world are fighting for space on my lap and making it very difficult to type.
I’ve read up on reverse culture shock, but I don’t think it actually applies to a two week visit after an eight month absence. I think that stuff hits you a little harder when you actually repatriate after a considerably longer length of time. I think reverse culture shock is a little more serious than the “holy crap everything I thought I was familiar with is freaking weird” feeling that I’ve got going on.
When we landed in Chicago, we went to our gate to wait for our connecting flight to Little Rock. And I realize how horribly insensitive this is to say, but it was like going whale watching. Bear in mind that I’ve been in a place where the overwhelming majority is skinny enough to look unhealthy or model-quality by American standards, and it was WEIRD to see such a large number of serious obese people. I’m not talking about people with some extra poundage, or with larger figures. I’m talking about *really* large people (the sort whose doctors are frantically begging them to do something), and I just hadn’t seen that in a while. Also, the amount of English flying at me from all directions made me feel a little dizzy. Since I started studying characters, I developed the habit of looking really intently at any printed material I saw outside (signs, ads, etc.) to see if I could recognize any characters. I usually could get one or two, but I really had to LOOK at everything hard. When I stepped into the Chicago airport, that habit kicked in and for a few seconds my brain was on spin cycle, trying to wrestle with such a huge load of symbolic content I’d just actively engaged with. Then there were the people speaking English. Everywhere. Granted, when I’m at work, I’m around English speakers, and when I’m at Castle Bar, most people speak English, but somehow this was a lot different. We were sitting next to a group of missionaries, and I got really disgusted listening to their conversation (I don’t remember specifics, they just had a really disrespectful attitude toward the culture they were trying to “save,” and that really bothers me). And I couldn’t STOP listening. Then I had to readjust to being somewhere where most people could understand ME. I’ve developed a tendency to swear very openly in public, and it takes some conscious effort not to do that, or to converse about people nearby. Stuff like that. I bought a bag of cheezits and some altoids at the airport, and it felt really, really, really weird to use English to complete a transaction and even have a little bit of a conversation.
Then we flew to Little Rock, met up with our parents, ate at Waffle House (which was fun), and went our separate ways. I was feeling really off balance as a result of jet lag and the unpleasant first impression I’d had of my nation, and I lay down on the hotel bed to try to sleep some of it off. But I’ve been sleeping on a really hard Chinese mattress for eight months, and the hotel bed felt like it was made out of flan. I kept sinking and sinking and sinking… It was very hard to get to sleep.
But by the end of the next day, I was in New Orleans. I abruptly switched from, “man, the US sucks,” to “THE US IS AWESOME!!!!!” New Orleans is a strange place anyway, and that made it easier to deal with than more familiar ground. I could tell I had China leftovers in my head when I was amazed at how clean everything was, but all the obsessing over my two national mindsets got dropped pretty fast when I was presented with so much eye candy. I got to see my sister, walk around a cemetery, walk around the french market, see a really good production of As You Like It, and get my bearings a little bit. We didn’t stay long, but it was a good visit, and made me much more optimistic about the next two weeks of my life. And I’ll continue later, because I’m too tired to stay awake any longer. Here are some pictures from New Orleans.
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