On Weirdness

I got a lot of use out of the word “weird” when I moved into my dorm in Japan four months ago. My friends and I would say, “They drive on the other side of the road! That’s so weird!” Or, “There are so many people here with bicycles! Isn’t that weird?” Or even, “Look at her outfit! It’s so weird. I love it.”

We newcomers, especially we Americans, were excited to point out the differences and find the kinds of things we deemed “weird.” After all, I left America in search of weirdness; growing up in Louisiana and going to college in Alabama meant my life had so far involved few drastic changes of scenery or community for more than a week. I had been abroad before on a vacation to Italy, and I’d been up North to see my cousins in Buffalo and visited New York City. I’d even been to Alaska. But no week-long visit completely acquainted me with a new place, and I was happy to find that there were so many ways in which Hirakata City, Osaka, Japan, was something different from West Monroe, Louisiana, or Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

And so the “weird”s went on. “Weird!” we would exclaim, “They don’t have soap in the bathroom!” Or, “People are always staring at us. Don’t you think that’s kind of weird?” The “weird”s continued, even after a month, even after two months in our new country. Even the last week we all spent in Japan ,we were still at least mentally coming up with new “weird”s to add to our own personal collections of weird. In addition to all the Japan weirds, though, we had the hypothetical weirds that we anticipated upon our return home.

“I can’t wait to be literate again!” we would say, “It’s going to be weird being able to read food packages.” Sometimes, “I can’t wait to get a waiter I understand again. It’ll be really weird to be able to make small talk again.” We even thought, “It’s going to be weird blending in again after sticking out so much here.”

Now that my fellow Kansai Gaidai students and I have arrived home, we like to discuss the weirdness of being home. However, these weirds are different from the ones we assumed not so long ago. Sure, we are literate; I can walk up and down the grocery aisle and know exactly what is in every box, bag, or can. We can communicate without struggling; I had a long conversation with my waitress at Olive Garden tonight. Also, we fit in to the crowd again; I wandered around Wal*Mart feeling and looking like I belonged, being taller than some people and shorter than others and not the least bit out of place in my t-shirt and shorts. The funny thing is—it isn’t weird. In my mind, things in West Monroe are the way they are supposed to be. The way things work and the places in which they work that way are failing to strike me as weird at all because that’s how I know and remember them.

What my friends and I are discovering, then, is that the truly weird part of studying abroad is coming home and having to remind yourself that you are, indeed, home. When I picked up my American cell phone for the first time in months and tried to send a text message, or when I examined the contents of a drawer that I hadn’t opened for so long, I felt as if I had gone back in time. Technically, I really have time traveled: when I crossed the International Date Line back in January, I went to the future, and when I crossed it again on Monday, I traveled back into the past. However, this minor literal detail has no real effect on me other than sounding like a cool thing to say. The reason I feel like I’ve time traveled, then, is everything here is as it was before I left, and now that I am back, it is still the same. I am the thing that is different. I am what has changed.

Before I left this country, I was taught about the stages of culture shock. After the euphoria, the general grumpiness, and the slow acceptance, comes the stage in which the student abroad comes to feel like the country in which she is living is a place where she feels at home. With all the “weird”s so present in my life in Japan, I never really thought that I would get that far. Certainly I was used to living in Hirakata, taking trains, spending this much money on a meal whenever I ate out, but in the back of my mind I knew that I belonged in the American South; no way this country where I could barely communicate with anyone outside the dorm would become “home” to me.

I was somewhat surprised, then, as I, newly arrived home, said to my parents, “I think partially it’s because back home—”

I stopped short and was met with twin confused stares. Standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, in which I have lived practically my entire life, speaking to my actual parents, I had referred to an impersonal dorm in a minor city in a foreign country as “back home.”

That, I think, is the weird part.

by Margaret E. Brandl

~ by themissingink on June 2, 2009.