By Wei Liu
At the end of July 2011, after I received my Doctoral degree from Beijing, I arrived in a western Canadian city to pursue a postdoc opportunity. It was a different experience to open a bank account in Canada. You do it at the window in China, while in Canada I was invited into a room. It was confusing to see all the different items in the grocery store. I asked a lady working in a grocery store what “canola oil” was, and she said “canola oil is oil from canola”. I did not think it was polite to ask “what is canola?” There was a small theatre close to the university. I walked by it one day, and saw the poster for a free movie. It said free admission after the donation of a “non-perishable food item for the Food Bank”. I understood the word “non-perishable” from “Publish or Perish”. As for “Food Bank”, I did not know what that was. I assumed it was an ATM machine for food. Wasn’t that called a vending machine? I found everything expensive in Canada, so a free movie sounded very good to me. I got the cheapest non-perishable item in the store, something called “Craft Dinner”. It was on sale for about a dollar. It looked like noodles with a bag of sauce. But why white sauce? It was not appetizing to me. Anyway it worked and it got me into the theatre.
But something was very strange that night. All the people showed up in bathrobes and sandals. And they all wore sunglasses. Many had long hair and long beards, either real or fake. I learned about Halloween as a Western holiday when people dress up to go “Trick or treating”. But it was early August, far away from Halloween. I did not understand what was going on until the movie started. They all dressed up to look like the main character, someone called “The Big Lebowski”! But was this guy really important here? How come I never heard about this person, nor this movie, while I was in China? He was a slacker who did not take life seriously. He did not have a job. He went bowling all the time. He drank all the time. He swore all the time. The most expensive item in his rented apartment was a rug and he seemed to care a lot about it. But somehow people here admired him and they could even memorize and echo the lines he said in the movie. Was this an important part of Canadian culture, or North American culture, or the Western culture that I never learned? I did learn before that North American culture was a more relaxed culture. But I thought “relaxed” meant wearing jeans and T-shirts. I did not realize it could be this relaxed. I guessed there were so many things that I did not know about and I did not learn in my English classes in China. Everyone else enjoyed the movie, but I did a lot of thinking while watching the movie.
To really think of it, my Lebowski shock is different from the Culture Shock that most people know and talk about. The Culture Shock seems to be more concerned with the large culture, the ethnic and national culture in broad and more generalizable patterns. A good example of the large culture is Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, such as individualism versus collectivism, uncertainty avoidance versus ambiguity tolerance, strong social hierarchy versus weak social hierarchy, task orientation versus people orientation, and indulgence and restraint. The Culture Shock can be seen as bigger shocks, experienced by people totally alien to a culture with little previous experience with it. The Lebowski shock that I experienced is rather the shock with more nuanced small cultures that a culture 101 course would not mention. I did not have much of a language barrier in the traditional sense. I had my honeymoon with the English culture long before I came to Canada. I watched English movies, English TV shows, read English books, and took courses to learn the culture behind the English language. But I was still shocked in some small but significant ways after many years’ language and cultural orientation before I came. The Lebowski shock is the shock that makes me see the complexity of culture, as it may be counterintuitive or even deconstructive to the broad stereotypical understanding of a culture.
September came and the new school year started. The teacher education research center that had me as a Postdoc had a routine activity. All graduate students and some faculty members gathered every week to talk about the progress of their research projects and the issues that they had come across in their research. It was like a learning community where we were supposed to give and get professional help in a group. One day, a Master’s student from Iran shared her idea for her research project. She wanted to study Iranian women and how their freedom and human rights were deprived of by the Iranian government. Weren’t there too many Western critiques on Iran, on China, on Russia, from Western perspectives? Was she trying to live up to a dominant Postcolonial Western discourse on the rest of the world? Should I say something about this?
While in China, I heard many times from many sources that the Chinese are more indirect than Westerners in our communication styles. We were often self-critical about it, believing that our practice in beating around the bush is a waste of energy and is inferior to the more direct Western way where black is black and white is white, and things are kept simple. The Chinese indirectness is a way to protect people’s face and feelings, and the need to protect people’s face and feelings makes the Chinese unable to become critical. I thought to myself, “I am in Canada. I should cut out my Chinese crap, be direct and be critical.” I said to the Iranian girl that her idea for her research was a racist, imperialist, structuralist, modernist idea and a very boring idea too. I received an email from my Canadian professor after the meeting, suggesting that I crossed a line and what I said was not consistent with the supportive and constructive culture at the center. Given time, I learned that Canadians are the most polite people on earth. It is very hard for Canadians to be direct in giving negative opinions. The most negative thing they can possibly say is “This is interesting”! I was a complete jerk at the meeting.
If I had not come to Canada, and I only learned about Canada in my English classes or through online virtual programming in China, my experiences with Canada might have stayed more at the Hofstede level, not down to the Lebowski level. I might never have the opportunity to experience the Lebowski shock, to experience the complex and nuanced cultures in Canada which served to shake my stereotypical thinking about the two different cultures. I might still think that the Canadians are direct and the Chinese are indirect. What if I had a super critical cross-cultural educator who could point me to the complexity of cultures and help me move beyond the large culture stereotypes? But it would still not give me the same sensations when I was in the Canadian movie theater, the Canadian grocery store, and the Canadian seminar room. I may be quick in agreeing with the professors about cultural nuance and complexity as a concept, an idea, but what that really feels like, I may never know.
Note: This story is taken from a paper published in the Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education in 2022, titled “The Smell, the Emotion, and the Lebowski Shock: What Virtual Education Abroad Cannot Do?” If you are interested in reading the whole paper, please go and download it at: https://www.ojed.org/index.php/jcihe/article/view/3808.
Comments