(A picture from the side of our dorm - being on the 9th floor definitely has its advantages!)
During the Fall 2007 semester, I took The American Life of Japanese Women with professor Jan Bardsley as a first-year seminar (specifically for UNC first-year students). It was easily the best course I have had thus far at UNC-Chapel Hill! And, even more so than my Chinese Civilization course (which was also wonderful), studying the travels of Asian women in the United States as well as American women in Japan and Asian nationst helped prepare me for this travel in more of a mental way than I had ever anticipated.
One of the best books that prepared me for my trip was Cathy Davidson’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji and how traveling in Asia, through Davidson’s eyes, was “a look at the seductiveness and disappointments of being a stranger in a strange land, the memoir of a deeply personal interior journey, and a poignant meditation on whether we can see things clearly only at a distance.” I finally feel like I can connect with the story that I read a year ago, now that I am in Asia. And I keep encountering events that remind me of it daily. Simply knowing that other people had gone through these things, other American women like myself, puts things is such a different perspective that’s also so much easier to handle.
One of the biggest points we discussed in class when talking about this book, however, was how people act when they are abroad. Davidson herself explains the joy of being in a foreign country and relishing the anonymity of it all, not having to bow to your host country’s cultural rules (since you are, after all, an ignorant foreigner). This includes feeling free to represent and interpret your own country’s rules in your new settings however you want to. I feel like this is happening on this trip with some of my peers. This happened in Singapore but since we are living here, the lines are being blurred more and more as different sides of people show, in good ways and bad ways.
If you went abroad, do you know how you would react to your settings? Would you continue abiding the laws of your home country, knowing you might go unpunished here? Would you choose to abide by certain norms and etiquette, and ignore the ones you don’t necessarily agree with or find troublesome? I feel like abroad, we are getting a different sense of one another on this trip. But I do not know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, as people say things here that could be rude back home, but I do not know if that should be held against them since…we aren’t back home.
I am afraid most people use study abroad as an excuse to go out and do stupid things. I’ve already talked about this with people close to me and I don’t know how to interpret my peers here at times, and their actions. Should people still be accountable under our home country’s standards while in a foreign country? Or is that something that is expected to bend and break while abroad, to give people a taste of what Davidson felt at the anonymity of roaming around a nation, relieved from all cultural rules and societal norms?
No comments:
Post a Comment