“People always have strong emotional connections with the first foreign country they have been to”, that’s what my friend told me before I went abroad for the first time. I didn’t fully understand these words until I came back to China from 6-month internship abroad. I spent amazing wonderful time in Poland during those 6 months even though I felt frustrated with work sometimes. After came to US, my view of that statement slightly changed to “People always have strong emotional connections with countries where they have great memories with friends.”
Living in an environment which is totally different from your home country will enable you to think and observe things in a way you couldn’t manage while in home country. Not until I went to Poland and had the opportunities to communicate with lots of international friends, I found out that there’re so many stereotypes and overgeneration about Chinese culture. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I was asked “Is it safe to live in China?”, “Are your Chinese eating everything?!”.
It’s fun of talking about culture differences with internationals. Personally I’m willing to introduce Chinese culture to either friends or random people i meet, at the same time I try to be open to different point of views and avoid judging. I guess that’s why I can made friends with many internationals.I used to think I was very open-minded. However, once one of my friends here in US asked me, “Monica, are you a conservative person?” “Of course not!” I replied. Then he asked. “Which standard? You mean compare to Chinese or American?” So I realized that I’m liberal (or maybe crazy) compare to majority Chinese but just average liberal according to my American friends’ standard. Yeah, one thing I like living abroad is that you can gradually explore more to recognize yourself.
In the opposite, one thing I don’t like living abroad is the “Reverse Culture Shock”, which is the difficult and surprising from an affected person when he/she deal with home culture after return from long-term experience living abroad. I had a conversation of this topic before with my friend Nick from Australia. He had been living in Japan for one year before he came to my city in China for internship. Both of us experienced the uncomfortableness and anxiety result from reverse culture shock. After came back from Poland, I badly missed the three-time-cheek-kissing between friends, I badly missed the time I can do crazy things without being judged by other people, I badly wanted to go back to Poland to hang out with old friends.
To some extent, these kind of feeling motivate me to apply for graduate school abroad, and I’m so happy I made it. Now it is summer time, some of my internationals friends already left, some of them are going to graduate soon. It's a season of saying goodbye, full of sadness. No matter where will we be, i guess we will still miss each other as if we are always together.
