Being in a strange land can be a disorientating experience.
Subtleties are lost and gestures misunderstood. But, as
Alexander Howard discovered while teaching English
in China, that might just be the point
Experience
culture shock
OU’RE GETTING A LITTLE FAT,’
my student Tina said to me.
Other students filed out of the
classroom, chatting gleefully
with their friends on the way to their next
class. I stopped erasing the chalkboard.
‘Pardon?’ I said, wiping chalk from my
hands. ‘Maybe you like Chinese food too
much,’ she said. And then she left, her
message delivered.
I was in my third month of teaching
English in China and, by then, I’d begun
to grasp the various ways my students
were often direct, sometimes blunt. It
cropped up in their journals, where I’d
asked them to record their daily thoughts
on anything that interested them. Usually
they wrote about their classes or friends,
but sometimes I appeared, in slight
caricature. My nose was large, my skin
dotted with freckles and too tanned.
I spoke too loudly and laughed too much
with the other foreign teachers between
classes. And now I was fat.
But, by then, I’d learned that my students
weren’t being rude. They were making
observations of the world in front of them
- just as I’d asked. It certainly wasn’t what
I’d expected when I suggested it. And that’s
how it crept up on me: a lingering case of
culture shock.
During my first weeks of living in China,
bumbling through the language and
sorting out the basics – like how to feed
myself – every day was an adventure.
A mall near campus had an entire floor of
tiny restaurants – more than a dozen – and
I tasted my way across China – the spices
of Sichuan, Hunanese, Guangdong-style
seafood and local Jiangsu’s sweet and sour
flavours. I made friends with the staff,
winging it with basic Mandarin and
a dictionary, learning where they were
from and how many kids they had.
A few days after Tina’s diagnosis,
I wandered into the campus printing office,
a tiny space in the administration building
with two archaic laser printers. The only
person on staff was a slight, birdlike
woman named Miss Xu who darted
between the printer trays and cubbies that
lined the wall. I held up a worksheet for my
students and said ‘60’, not really knowing
the Mandarin word for copies.
She understood this request and
snatched the paper from my hands. After a
few moments she returned with a stack of
warm photocopies. Then she said
something I couldn’t understand. I smiled
and said ‘Xiexie’ – thanks – and started
moving towards the door. She repeated this
mysterious sentence. I uttered a vague
‘uh huh’, still moving towards the door.
She approached, repeating key words of
the original sentence, this time in a slightly
different order. ‘Qian’ I thought I heard.
Money. Of course! I needed to pay for the
copies. I produced a wad of cash, but she
waved it away and repeated her statement.
‘Ting budong,’ I said. I don’t understand.
She waved her hand again, this time
shooing me away, the meaning of whatever
she was trying to tell me lost in the silence
between us.
In time, I learned to navigate moments
like this with a healthy dose of humility,
sometimes enlisting the help of Daniel, one
of my students whose English was far
better than my Mandarin. I learned, for
example, that printing costs are allocated
to your department, and Miss Xu was
asking me what department I belonged to.
In the years of travel that followed my
experiences in China, I linger on moments
like the ones with Tina and Miss Xu,
savouring the miscommunications and
bodged translations, of getting lost and
finding your way again. I know that culture
shock is just an unfamiliar world becoming
a little more familiar.
F Multiple airlines fly with connecting flights
from London Heathrow to Nanjing, including
Swissair, Lufthansa, China Southern, China
Eastern, Cathay pacific and British Airways
(return from £470; swiss.com/gb/en). Online
teaching English as a foreign language
qualification courses start at £320 (tefl.org).alexander howard is a senior
digital editor for Lonely Planet,
and his writing on travel news and
trends is widely published.
PHOTOGRAPH: MATT MUNRO