Assignment 4

As an international student in the University of Delaware, I often focus on the presence of other international students in the same university, particularly those from my home country, Taiwan. Even though the university advises international students to stick with American students to catch up with the American Culture and to learn English faster, most of the Taiwanese and Chinese students that I encounter still tend to interact with those of the same cultural backgrounds. Moreover, in only a few minutes these international students who have never met before can talk and joke to each other as if they have been acquaintances for years.

Cultural difference might be intimidating at first glance, but one should also know that similarities are still shared among cultures, since they are all founded by humans. For a foreigner, of course, experiencing culture shock is still unavoidable at first, because it takes time to fit into a new culture. Living in a society much unlike ours, we often face difficulties like adjusting to a new table manner, a different definition of politeness, and even daily habits that we find alien. Under these circumstances, most foreigners face troubles to fit into a new society, and thus fail to build up a sense of belonging which every human needs as a social animal to feel safe. Language barrier also prevents one to fit in a foreign society, since one will find it hard to understand the content of everyday conversation, and in times of emergency this barrier can have disastrous results. All the factors above can make a foreign person seek for traces of his own culture, and the less the traces are the more desperate the person can be in trying to gain a sense of belonging and familiarity on an otherwise alien land.


During my times spend abroad I have faced the problems mentioned above. Despite my relatively better English-speaking skills, I sometimes still feel excluded in a different culture. On the first day that I spend in a British household, for example, I felt as if all the values previously firmly held were breaking down. At the dinner table I got blamed simply because I put the fork on the wrong side, and the way I ate the food was regarded as offensive. The worst thing is, most English people have dinner at 4:00 PM, which troubled me since most Taiwanese people have dinner around 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM. After two days of sufferings in the English household, with shower times much limited, I suddenly had a strong wish to stay in a Taiwanese or Chinese household in England, but I felt instantly ashamed by my cowardice. In another experience, I was totally shocked and even terrified by the dazzling chaos of the UD Freshmen Party that I stuck tightly to the Chinese friends whom I did not even know several minutes ago. Normally, in my home country I do not form friendships with strangers easily. However, here in the UD the Chinese freshmen, especially those who live on my floor, sometimes are like my relatives and become my only links to my home country where most things that I’m familiar with reside.

Despite the fact that I perfectly understand Liu’s predicaments, as someone who has gone through similar situations I take Liu’s decisions to stay with his people and even leaving the U.S forever to be disgraceful. Liu’s failure to adjust lies in the fact that he over-generalizes the American Culture. Indeed the United States is a culture that differs greatly from both Taiwan and China, but from a sociological perspective a culture also contains many subcultures. Some subcultures actually hold values that are quite similar to ours. For instance, I still found it comfortable to communicate and even laugh with my teenage friends in the UK, who share my music taste, regardless of my sufferings in a conservative English household. In another example, I have formed close friendships with quite a few American students, even though I still occasionally find other American students strange. Apparently, given the examples above, Liu picks the wrong subculture to stay in. Moreover, he still had not spent enough time to know the new culture in detail before giving up and making a misinformed summary stating that it’s impossible for him to make an American friend. Cultures differ, but cross-cultural exchanges are not impossible as long as one finds the fittest way to do so.