Perhaps this isn’t the moment to blog. I’m sitting on my perky red couch late at night, dazed, exhausted, and nauseous (I’m never quite sure how to say that) with a violent kitten hopping across me. She gets jealous of the pink mac and tries to distract me from typing by doing laps across my shoulders and body with an occasional stop to try to bite the computer. However, tonight I truly experienced culture shock, and I want to document the feeling before I recover.

I’ve lived in China for nearly a year and a half now, and I can honestly think of only two times that I truly felt what I believe to be culture shock. Culture surprise is something I often experience or culture ignorance or culture gap, but culture shock is rare. Maybe that’s because I have been providentially designed to adapt to northeast China. Maybe it’s all those times my mother made me do things I didn’t want to do or didn’t understand, telling me that it was good mss training. Maybe it’s Bob’s extreme BYWAV boot camp. Whatever the reason, I am thankful and blessed to actually find cultural differences so un-shocking.

The few times when I have had culture shock have usually been when I was overwhelmed by trying to adjust to two foreign cultures at one time: for example, the ill-fated trip to Korea one month after coming to China. I will forever be sorry for my dear cousin and friend Georgia who had to put up with me turning into a physical and emotional basket case upon arriving in yet another new foreign culture. My mind, which had worked so hard to begin adapting to the vast change of China, rebelled when it reached Korea. I was dazed and confused and sick and wished only to return to China where at least I had a tiny clue.

Which leads me to today. It was a day of planned cultural adventures. The morning started normally, with two classes of freshmen oral English. I love those freshmen. Today before lunch, they helped me practice ordering a new kind of noodle dish, the kind with bean sprouts that Justin likes. So after class, I marched across the snow out the back gate of our school to the shabby noodle shop. I love that place. I’ll have to blog a description of noodling there sometime. For now, I’ll just say that even though I don’t fit in culturally to the noodle shop scene, somehow I always feel right at home.

After lunch, my Chinese friend arrived to start the afternoon’s first cultural adventure. After lots of advice from helpful students and friends, I have decided to abandon western medicine for the treatment of my allergy-induced, asthma-like cough and lung issues and branch out to try traditional Chinese medicine. If I return to the regular doctor at the hospital, he’s already said that he’ll just try more drugs. My body is tired of drugs and isn’t reacting well to them at all lately, so I don’t think that trying a round of mysterious herbs can do much harm. Plus, I get to experience something that Chinese people have been doing for thousands of years: drinking nasty and hopefully helpful natural medicines.

So, off we went in a taxi through the bitterly cold wind to the best traditional Chinese medicine hospital in town. I had some good advice about which hospital and that we should ask for an old experienced doctor when we arrived. It turned out to be easier than anticipated. The oldest most experienced doctor of all was in, and, for about three times the price of the next experienced doctor (still only about 7 US dollars), we could see him. As we went through the hallways, searching for exam room 3, my friend kept sniffing nostalgically. “Nothing else smells like this,” she said. “Only traditional Chinese medicine has this special smell.” It’s hard to describe that smell, but if you could pack everything you think of when you imagine ancient China into a smell, I think that would be it: spicy and foreign and unique. “Soon your whole apartment will smell like this,” she said. “Do you think your cat will like it?”

In a way, it was just like going to see a regular doctor—in China. We marched into the room and stood around with lots of patients and family members and watched him treat about five other people before it was my turn. Privacy is not really a priority in China, at least in health care. The doctor was a quiet man who seemed to ask lots of questions of each person before writing them a personalized herbal plan of care. (After my friend broke out the electronic English dictionary, I learned that most of his questions to the patients seemed to revolve around their bowel movements.) Finally, I sat down on the little stool in front of him, and he held my wrists, as if feeling my pulse, to check me out. My friend explained the timeline of the allergy cough to him. Then he told me how I felt. “You have a tickle and tightness in your throat and chest most of the time.” Wow, so true! “Nothing happens when you cough except painfulness.” Right on. My friend summed up his conclusion. “He can’t take away the allergies, but he thinks he can help the cough go away.” To me, this sounded like more than I could hope for. But first, he had an important question. “Can you drink the bitter medicine twice a day?” “I’ll do it,” I promised. And I will. If I can go for seven days to the hospital and have a so-strong-it’s-killing-me antibiotic dripped into me through an IV, I can drink the bitter herbs.

After more paying and waiting, we left the hospital, armed with packets of herbs to mix and drink for seven days. Next week, I’ll return to see the old doctor for a progress report.

My friend and I returned triumphantly through a biting, snowy wind to my warm apartment. She was reluctantly to leave, so we made hot chocolate and watched the video from English summer camp. The joy and craziness of the campers and teachers fascinated her. As we sat there, she turned to me and said, “When will my life be like yours?”

I was a little confused by the question. “What do you mean?”

“You have such a great life. You don’t have a lot of money, but you have enough. You like your job and your friends. You have your own apartment, and you aren’t in debt. You can do whatever you want, and you are so happy. I want to have a life like yours, someday.”

There are few things as humbling as seeing your life through someone else’s eyes. I had to agree with her: my life is truly blessed. I was able to take just a few minut
es and remind her of how I’d committed when I was her age to following His plan for my life and how He is the one who blesses me and gives me peace.

After a couple of peaceful hours, I prepared for the next cultural adventure of my day. I have made friends with a Russian teacher and her little daughter. I help the daughter with her oral English once a week, and then the mom and I visit for a while. She’s a bit lonely and struggles sometimes with being a single mom in a foreign culture, so she enjoys talking to me even though her English isn’t as good as her Chinese.

This evening, they invited me to eat with them at a “real” Russian restaurant. Now, this is the fourth Russian restaurant that I’ve tried since moving to this city. It’s famous for it’s Russian influence. However, often the restaurant is staffed by Chinese people, even to the cook, and, like, Chinese-American food, the menu is usually tweaked for the tastes of the people who will eat there. But the Russian teacher assured me that this place was owned and staffed by Russians, and that it was a center of the Russian community in our city. So, off we went through the frosty night: me in my bright green coat and the Russian lady and her daughter in their fur coats and hats.

It was a memorable evening. I’m a little dazed now to put it all into words. The food was very good, if expensive. I had borscht and stroganoff and pickled vegetables and coffee and a very rich and creamy dessert. Somehow I thought that the stroganoff would be over noodles or rice, but it wasn’t, so I had a large amount of beef and mushrooms and cream sauce. Really, last year all that cream sauce and creamy dessert would have been a dream come true, but now my stomach seems unaccustomed to so much dairy and is very, very unhappy. (I’ve noticed I can no longer each much cheese at one time without side effects, either.)

The evening also included a live show with Russian ballroom dancers and singers and a very talented Chinese man who performed an unexpected version of John Denver’s “Country Roads”. A crowd of tourists came in from a bus for the show. They were mostly from Hong Kong, and they enjoyed seeing us eating—thinking I was a Russian, I’m sure. It was all very interesting and fun, but as the evening went on, I noticed that I was feeling more and more uncomfortable. Physically I was stuffed and suffering from the richness of the food, but also I was getting more and more depressed. It suddenly occurred to me why: my Russian friend had been complaining the whole time. It was subtle, so subtle that it took me all evening to really become affected by it, but her whole tone of conversation was a constant complaint. She was complaining about our school, about China, about her ex-husband, about herself even. My head was actually throbbing from the strain of trying to keep from getting discouraged.

At one point, she looked at me as I was trying to explain to her my own positive view of whatever negative Chinese situation she was telling me about. She looked confused by my continued insistence to try to see the good here.

“Maybe, I’ve been here too long to be flexible like you,” she said.

And I thought, “Nope. That’s not it.”

By the time I returned home tonight, I felt that I had reached my limit of cultural adaptation for the day. Trying to mingle American, Chinese, and Russian cultures was my shock, but I think the real shock was trying to mix two other cultures: as Bob would say, “the people of G and the people not of G”. As I think about it, I realize that I myself was the culture shock to my friends. And Justin would say that’s how it should be. How I am, how my life is, should be supernatural, shocking, weird… it should point blatantly to Someone else. I hope I give culture shock more than I have it. That’s why I’m here on earth.