Fish for Dinner: Culture shock at home, abroad, and online

Abroad

They say the most stressful experiences are as follows:

• Death in the family
• Divorce
• Moving house
• Major Illness
• Changing Jobs

Moving countries has a lot of 3 and 5 in it, plus saying goodbye to friends. I’ve just moved back to Australia after three years in Vietnam and so am getting all that plus one more: reverse culture shock.

(click on PDF icon, above right, if you prefer black-on-white script)

For mine, coming back is always tougher than going there.

You expect the strange when you travel abroad. You’re prepared for it (or should be, anyway). As I’ve done all my work in developing countries, I move expecting not only a different culture, but also a lack of basic infrastructure. Whether bad roads, tropical parasites, non-existent public health system, or stereotypical sleazy old westerners hanging out in sports bars, I know the downsides.

It’s returning that I’ve always found harder. Because, a) you perceive your home country in a whole new way, often seeing offensive cultural practices for the first time; and b) your homeland can change while you are away.

Before we get there, I should note halfway-home shock can be pretty bad, as well.

I spent a year in Mongolia around fifteen years back. Working in an Ulaanbaatar (UB) city government department, training social workers and getting funding to support street children and broken families.

I remember my first day in the office – which shared a building with two high-schools – being shocked and outraged when, going in for morning tea, my colleagues at the department smoked and drank in front of school kids. Disgraceful, I thought to myself.

Fast forward one year, and I’m sitting in that same café with my workmates, smoking, drinking vodka, and eating mutton doughnuts at 1030am. 2001 was a tough year for my liver.

Mongolian culture was so much richer than my first impressions, of course – the Mongols after all once commanded the largest land empire in human history, stretching from Korea in the East, though China, all the way to Hungary. The fusion of animist and Buddhist belief, the throat singing, the nomadic lifestyle; the beauty of a snow-swept, pristine horizon, a sense of humour strangely close to the Australian, the kick-arse women running the show. Loved it.

But yeah, UB circa 2001 was struggle town, with a bleak economy and landscape, dilapidated infrastructure, an undercurrent of violence, and far too many rabid dogs.

So you can imagine my shock when I had a stop-over in Singapore on the way home after my project finished and, jet-lagged, stumbled into a 6-story gaming arcade. The cacophony of sound, the flashing neon, the swarming crowds; they rendered me stunned, much like a dog in the first stage of rabies: rooted to the spot, staring into space. Eventually I escaped to my cheap hotel room to eat two minute noodles and watch Seinfeld on the television. A strange way for an Australian to culturally decompress, but there you have it.

Home

Fast forward a decade to 2011, after returning to Australia after three years in Laos. I was shocked. Disillusioned, even, at the mendacious small-mindedness of Australians, the selfishness, the emergence of acceptable snobbery in a country that used to pride itself on being down-to-Earth. I went from working with ethnic minority children in the poorest provinces of Laos (which is another way of saying: the poorest people on the planet) to one of the wealthiest countries in the world with the most liveable cities – and all the people did there was complain.

I wrote a fiery, rather rough rant that was bought by ABC’s The Drum. Titled ‘Snobs and Whingers, the New Australia’, It ended up going viral (nearly a million unique hits, I’m told – pretty good out of a population of 23 million).

I didn’t realise at the time, but that article was an expression of intense reverse culture shock. Truth, as well – I still believe everything I wrote in it, moreso now.

This time back, I still feel Australians are as selfish as ever, and where once there used to be a respect for the working class, it is now acceptable to be bigoted towards them. People use the word ‘bogan’ and whether they realise it or not, what they are really doing is mocking the less wealthy, less educated, less privileged (Americans use the descriptor ‘poor white trash’ – give them points for honesty, if nothing else).

But I’m a little more mellow, my reaction a little less spectacular. Sure, the bureaucracy feels oppressive, people drive angry and walk angry, everything on television is either about cooking or home renovations; but I’ve not transformed into an incandescent ball of gobsmacked rage.

The difference is this time I return home with plenty of past experience in place to act as a buffer against the shock, but just as importantly, have encountered a culture far more toxic.

Online

Three years ago I became a writer. Which means my virtual community, in the main, is other writers. In writing science fiction, I deal with Americans online far more than I had previously. US authors dominate the science fiction market, the opinion pieces about where science fiction is going, and the culture wars raging within the genre.

One of the may unpalatable things I’ve noticed is online Americans – even the progressives –  tend to treat the world as an extension of itself. This is expected, in some ways, as both individuals and nations have a tendency to universalise their experiences. This is doubly so of the US, given its status as the global hegemon.

This is why ‘non-white’ countries are often treated like an American minority group.

Australian writer Jeremy Szal in his essay for American anthology ‘People of Colour Destroy Science Fiction’ describes his anger at the term ‘People of Colour’:

“The wealth of complex and multi-faceted cultures that this entire world has to offer—mine included—had all been funnelled down to a single, stagnate, Americana-exclusive phrase, negating all the wonders and intricacies of the world’s cultures. 

It’s something we need to move away from. Diversity cannot exist if it exists solely within America and is dominated by American terms.”

I should add here that I’ve seen Jeremy harangued and lectured online by white American progressives for refusing to accept their political terminology, including that for non-white people. The irony would be laughable if it wasn’t so insulting.

Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera has similar thoughts:

“It’s a bit disorienting for me to suddenly become a “person of colour” overnight just by wandering into the sf/f scene.

I dislike the overextension of “POC” outside America because it’s so explicitly an American term. I suppose its prevalence in the online sf/f community is a direct result of the sf/f field being so completely American-centric for so long…It’s a term that’s meaningful only to American minorities who understand its place in their history, who own its reclamation. By all means, use it in that context, where it is an excellent example of a strategic essentialism for the people that chose to use it.

Using it to describe all the billions of non-white peoples of the world, on the other hand, is not a strategic essentialism. It’s just plain old regular essentialism, nothing but a pure statement of American cultural hegemony: by using it this way, you are literally saying that all the multiplicity of histories and differences in the vast majority of the world population are all subsumed collectively into an honorary American minority for, what I don’t know, convenience.”

I’ve also seen western countries – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, you name it – filed away as some kind of bland offshoot mainstream American. Several times I’ve looked on as an otherwise informed US writer or editor dismisses Australian or English or New Zealand literature as somehow being the same (seriously, if you think they are: go fuck yourself).

At least my country gets named; mainland Europeans often get lumped together as one interchangeable group. I can’t help wonder, for example, how a French writer feels about being considered culturally the same as a Polish one, and vice-versa.

Then there’s the bewildering language of the online American genre community. To talk with them is to have to learn a new vernacular of the hyper-educated elite.

One example is the ‘micro-aggression’. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant until a duo of fairly well-known, wealthy, and extremely white American genre authors provide an example on Twitter.

The core of their complaint was this: they went to a restaurant. She ordered steak. He ordered fish. The waiter brought the meals out and – shock, horror – gave the steak to the man, the fish to the woman.

My immediate thoughts on reading this exchange went to the waiter. Now the waiter was never discussed, but it was probably a woman, probably non-white, an immigrant, and likely on minimum wage. I wondered how this waitress survived in the US, unable to earn enough for the necessities of food, shelter and medicine.

I’m sure after the outrage of being given fish instead of steak, these two self-proclaimed progressives stiffed her on the tip. Now it’s not that getting fish instead of steak shouldn’t be a source of mild irritation, it should. Rather, it’s that the responses to the mildest perceived slight are so over-wrought, so over-the-top, and so self-serving, it’s hard to find a lot of sympathy.

It seems to me this virtual group of writers, each nestled in the omphalos of their ego, often forget to raise their eyes to real, live iniquity in the world around them.

In America, whether it is the black lives matter movement; or growing inequality; or entrenched social class (it is now as hard to move classes in the US as in socially-stratified UK); or rampant political corruption; or an epidemic of PTSD among veterans returning from unnecessary wars, there are any number of entrenched, devastating social problems in that country. Write about those.

But no, we don’t see that so much. If my Twitter stream and the short fiction I see is anything to go by, ‘micro-aggressions’ get equal billing with war crimes and climate change.

I’m picking on my own side here. On the other, we have the rather bizarre situation of conservative white writers claiming victim status. I won’t re-hash it here – it’s to exhausting to think about. Suffice to say a group called ‘Sad Puppies’ and a straight-up fascist offshoot, the ‘Rabid Puppies,’ took the roiling US culture war to new heights (or depths, to be more precise) by claiming they were unrepresented in awards ceremonies. Sigh.

To be clear: I believe these are the noisy few. I’ve been lucky to build friendships with numerous US authors, none of whom indulge in this conga-line of victimhood. All of whom roll their eyes at the occasional ridiculousness of it all. But they’re silent. For to speak out, even in a nuanced way, is to be subjected to a torrent of abuse and accusation on social media.

Luckily Australia has yet to embrace these toxic modes of political thought. Not yet, anyway. it’s true that some malignant seat-sniffers in the Coalition have looked to the Tea Party for inspiration. Presumably to fine-tune their messages of intolerance and division. It’s also true that on the other side, US political talking points are mindlessly dropped, context-free, into an Australian setting with gormless enthusiasm by the chai latte set, direct from their wealthy, all-white suburbs in inner-city Melbourne or Sydney (the Guardian Australia is the worst offender here).

Fortunately, though, these have been kept at the margins here, and we may have a few years’ grace before those toxic political fashions embed themselves in Australian political culture.

So, reeling from the narcissistic cornucopia of the online writing community, I’ve decided to withdraw from it, just to clear my head a little. And in that sense, Australia has been a balm for the mind. Compared to the mutated personas of online writers, Australians are models of restraint, rationality, and civility.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I miss Hanoi, miss that city terribly. But this time around I’m happy to return to a country where the air is clean, the schools are good, the cricket is on the television, and where old friends are keen to meet for a beer.

And, you know, where everyone isn’t screaming at each other.