Cultural Shock
"Culture shock" might be called an occupational disease of people who have been suddenly transplanted abroad. Like most ailments, it has its own symptoms and cure.
Culture shock is
precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all our signs and symbols of social intercourse. Those signs or cues include the thousand and one ways in which we orient ourselves to the situation of daily life; when to shake hands and what to say when we meet people, when and how to give tips, how to make purchases, when to accept and when to refuse invitations, when to take statements seriously and when not.
Now when an individual enters a strange culture, all or most of these familiar cues are removed. He or she is like a fish out of water. No matter how broad-minded or full of goodwill you may be, a series of props has been knocked out from under you, followed by a feeling of frustration and anxiety. People react to the frustration in much the same way. First they reject the environment which causes the discomfort. "The ways of the host country are bad because they make us feel bad." When foreigners in a strange land get together to
grouse about the host country and its people, you can be sure they are suffering from culture shock. Another phase of culture shock is regression. The home environment suddenly assumes a tremendous importance. To the foreigner everything becomes irrationally glorified. All the difficulties and problems are forgotten and only the good things back home are remembered. It usually takes a trip home to bring one back to reality.
Individuals differ greatly in the degree in which culture shock affects them.
- (A) [■] Although not common, there are individuals who cannot live in foreign countries.
- (B) [■] During the first few weeks most individuals are fascinated by the new.
- (C) [■] They stay in hotels and associate with nationals who speak their language and are polite and gracious to foreigners.
- (D) [■] This honeymoon stage may last from a few days or weeks to six months, depending on circumstances. If one is very important, he or she will be brought to visit the show places, will be pampered and petted, and in a press interview will speak glowingly about goodwill and international friendship.
But this mentality does not normally last if the foreign visitor remains abroad and needs to seriously cope with real conditions of life. It is then that the second stage begins, characterized by a hostile and aggressive attitude toward the host country. This hostility evidently grows out of the genuine difficulty which the visitor experiences in the process of adjustment. There are house troubles, transportation troubles, shopping troubles, and the fact that people in the host country are largely indifferent to all these troubles. They help, but they don’t understand your great concern over these difficulties. Therefore, they must be insensitive and unsympathetic to you and your worries. The result, "I just don’t like them." You become aggressive, you band together with others from your country and criticize the host country, its ways, and its people. But this criticism is not an objective appraisal.
You take refuge in the colony of others from your country which often becomes the fountainhead of emotionally charged labels known as stereotypes. This is a peculiar kind of offensive shorthand which caricatures the host country and its people in a negative manner. The "dollar grasping American" and the "indolent Latin American" are samples of mild forms of stereotypes. The second stage of culture shock is, in a sense, a crisis in the disease. If you come out of it, you leave before you reach the stage of a nervous breakdown.
If visitors succeed in acquiring some knowledge of the language and begin to get around by themselves, they are beginning to open the way into the new cultural environment. Visitors still have difficulties but they take a "this is my problem and I have to bear it" attitude. Usually in this stage visitors take a superior attitude to people of the host country. Their sense of humor begins to exert itself. Instead of criticizing, they joke about the people and even crack jokes about their own difficulties. They are now on the way to recovery.
According to the passage, people in the host country are thought to be largely indifferent to visitors’ troubles, because ______.
A．they are insensitive and unsympathetic
B．they are not fond of visitors
C．they do not mind others’ business
D．they consider the troubles not serious
