The Culture Shock Issue in the Janice Desroches’ “Culture Shock”

 

Every normal people in this world of course has a dream. Also there are so many ways to reach that dream, like applying to the company, or go to abroad. Some people might choose go to study abroad to another country which has possibility to have a different culture with someone’s own culture. So from that case, it can make people who choose that decision to go abroad feel a culture shock. Like in the story that written by Janice Desroches under title “The Culture Shock”, this story tells about a story of there are two girl who are feel a culture Shock. So, this essay is made to discuss a culture shock issue in this story.

            According to Adler 1981 as cited in Setiawan 2017,

“Adler (1981) defined Culture shock as primarily a set of emotional reactions to the loss of perceptual reinforcements from one's own culture, to new cultural stimuli which have little or no meaning, and to the misunderstanding of new and diverse experiences (p. 13). People who do not have enough information about the host country that they are going to visit tend to have a big possibility to experience culture shock”. (Adler, 1981 as cited in Setiawan, 2017)

            This culture shock that happens in the Janice Desroches’ story under title “Culture Shock” can be seen in the dialogue on the scene in the story below,

Chen: “It’s just it’s my first time away from home and I don’t think I fit in. I just

don’t think I can do this.”

Karen: “Listen to me Chen. You are not alone. You can do this.”

Chen: “But I’m not like you.”

Karen: “I believe we are more alike than you think.” I say, handing her another

tissue. “The United States is the only home I have ever known. Believe it or not, I felt ill with nerves this morning not knowing how everything would turn out.”

Chen’s sobs begin to slowly subside.

Karen: “Coming here I left my old job, my entire family, and all of my friends

behind. That is scary. It’s a risk, but a risk worth taking for me to better my life with this new job. Why did you come, Chen?” (p.2)

            In this story “Culture Shock” which written Janice Desroches, it tells a story about two different girls who have already left their homeland to go overseas to Canada. They are Karen who is a new teacher in Canada and Chen who is a new student in Canada, comes from China. Karen goes to Canada because wants a new better life than her life in United State, While Chen goes to Canada because she wants to study English as her parents’ wish. Both of Karen and Chen, they feel a culture shock, because of different culture between Canada and their homeland, their lack of information about their goal country which is Canada. As it says according to Setiawan, Culture shock is a culture perception of someone which is lost and replace with another culture. Culture shock can be felt to someone because her or his lack of information of her/his goal country. These Culture Shock can be seen from scene “It’s just it’s my first time away from home and I don’t think I fit in. I just don’t think I can do this.” It is spoken by Chen. From this scene, we can know that she feels cannot continue her study in Canada because she feel that she is not fit in Canada because of her culture shock. She feels lonely and she always wants to go back to her country.

            In conclusion, this story “Culture Shock” that written by Janice Desroches tells about the girls who feel a culture shock, because of their different culture. In simply way, a culture shock is a feeling or emotion that produced because of losing someone’s culture and it is replaced with another culture. A culture shock can be reduced with finding information as much as possible before we are planning to go abroad. This essay hope and also suggest people can find many information before they are planning go abroad to reduce a possibility of culture shock.

Reference

Lina and Setiawan. “An Analysis of Culture Shock from West to East as Seen in Reilly’s The Tournament.” An Analysis of Culture Shock, vol 15(2), 2017.