I think they just mean the place you've grown up in and lived for most of your life is what you're acclimated to. You can always acclimate to something else, but that's a lifelong process and not something that fully goes away. If you're from America, you're permanently American in a lot of ways. You might miss something as simple as reminiscing about the Simpsons with someone you meet, or you might miss something that seems innocuous here like a brand of gum.
I'm from a completely reactionary shit hole in the American south and despite how much I hate it for being infested with Klansmen, meth kitchens, and overall misery, I still get a pang of regret for leaving whenever I smell pine trees. They're not coming where I live now. Looking at creeks will do that to me as well, makes me remember when I used to love my family and we'd spend nights on the sand looking at stars.
I can expand upon this for others if it might make it a little easier to understand. When I was a kid in Australia a Lebanese friend I went to school with taught me a phrase when I asked if he missed his home. There's a an Arabic or Persian word "Qarib" which means near or familiar and "Gharib" means strange or stranger and the difference in the two is often imperceptible even to native speakers in both how they're written and pronounced. I don't remember the actual phrase now and I'm sure there's multiple but it's a play on words that conveys the meaning of feeling like a stranger in a familiar place, somewhere you never felt out of place before. Longing to return home only to go and find out the longing doesn't leave. I always got the gist of what he meant but I never internalized it until I moved to the United States. I know both where I came from and where I ended up are shitty anglo empires built on the backs of genocide and I'm not here to defend the nationalism or nations themselves, that's entirely missing the point and I'd be the last person to appeal to patsoc shit.
The point I'm trying to make is the place you grew up, the place you call home even if it's through gritted teeth and seething venom, there'll be a time when you sit and realize what you left there isn't there any more. Those memories will always be in the past and they're as distant as a lost loved one. You can remember them so clearly, almost feel their echo or smell them but you can't quite ever touch them again. You're never quite "From here" in your new home, and the home you left will never come back. I still wake up over a decade later having trouble sleeping without hearing the waves. Without being able to smell sugarcane and rainforest and ocean. The stars are different. The bugs sound wrong. The sky is too closed in.
There's nothing left in my home town for me, and there won't ever be again, but I'll never belong here either. I will always be Australian in ways that the material reality I grew up in shaped and formed thoughts and feelings and emotions and experiences that will impact all kinds of things. People will never not see me as Australian either. Americans have made that exceptionally clear to me in good and bad ways but both in spades. I didn't end up a commie until after moving to the states so I can promise "in what way it impacts you" is really up to the person, but the 'flavor' of them will always be shaped by those memories and that sense of longing for something you left but know isn't waiting for you if you return.
I know this isn't a unique experience in the slightest, I've shared this conversation with friends I've made in the states from Syria, from Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, China, Trinidad, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Nepal, and they all know exactly what I mean seconds into the conversation. I understand a lot of this is still a really privileged position in the first place, especially as a white guy from a settler colonial shithole built in an invaded paradise, but it's one of the few ways in which I can ALMOST understand what it's like to feel displaced, not to compare them in scale but to be able to more easily put myself in the shoes of others and START to understand the stronger version of this they go through.
It's this that makes me feel like if you have any possibility to travel when you're young especially, do it. Leave just go where-ever the fuck else you can and see as much of the world as you're able. Meet people and try and understand the world through their eyes. Actually put yourself into the world and lose pieces of you while gaining new ones from your new experiences. Reminisce and introspect. See the world through as many other eyes as you can until you're as far away from being relatable to the anglo empire that indoctrinated you from birth that you can be. You'll forever feel that loss but that pinprick of pain will do wonders to inoculate you from closing your heart to all those you meet that the empire would otherwise have indoctrinated you to be unable to relate to. You'll always be a shitty American or a shitty Australian or whatever else but you'll also never be those things again. Not like you were.
I'm sorry if this felt dismissive of anyone who went through these feelings without having had the option of doing it as their choice. I didn't mean to bring up complex feelings or feel like my relatively privileged international move was in any way comparable, I just wanted to illustrate the best I could that it's a complex difficult thing for people who have never experienced these things, even when you don't feel like it is at the time. Even when it's just a friendly jaunt around the world it will change you forever. I would only bet far more so when the trip isn't so friendly and of your own will. Nothing but love for you all. Never stop trying to be internationalists.
It’s hard to explain fully, but to put it concisely it’s “culture shock”
You have to constantly be calibrating when you are immersed in a foreign culture, and that takes a lot of mental work. You make cultural blunders and don’t even know it.
Everything you want to do is harder. Let’s say you have a cold here, you go to the pharmacy and buy DayQuil or whatever. Now imagine you are sick in China, you go to the pharmacy, and you can’t read anything; none of the boxes, the signs over the aisles, anything. So you have to find a shop keeper and mime your symptoms, she hands you a box, you hope it’s right… how much do you take? What do you take it with?
You go to wash your clothes, there’s no dryer, so you have to hang it out to dry, but it’s summer and super humid so the only way to dry your stuff is on a line inside so the A/C can dry it out, and now you have clotheslines across your ceiling.
You go to cook a meal and there’s one burner.
You go to take a shower and hot water is very limited, so you have to be done in 5 minutes.
You go to take a dump in a public place and there’s a squat toilet.
These are a few examples but everything takes work. None of these things are bad per se, if you’re Chinese from China it’s just what you’re used to, no biggie. But for you it’s completely different.
It’s worth it for the experience, but there’s an ease to life that accompanies being where you are from that is easy to underestimate until you don’t have it anymore, particularly in an environment as foreign as China.
This is exactly what I was going to say. I lived in a different country for a year while I worked as an English teacher, and I both loved and hated the "everything is an adventure" aspect of daily life. Need to talk to your bank? You'd better fucking focus, because you're about to use vocabulary that you don't use on a daily basis. Going to the grocery store? Oh shit, the way they have their register set up, I can't just read the total so now I have to focus because numbers are hard because there's no context to give you a nudge if you forget a word for a second. They're making an announcement on the train? You'd better listen up, because the sound quality isn't good and there's no face to look at to help with understanding. Also, there's a big difference between knowing enough of a language and get by in daily life and being fluent enough to have real conversations beyond the weather so you can actually make friends. I'm glad I went and I had a lot of experiences I value, but it was also the loneliest I've ever been and it was really tiring. I remember landing at O'Hare and riding the tram, an announcement came over the PA system, and I realized I was understanding everything without trying, and I was just like, "holy shit this is SO EASY." Same thing the first time I went grocery shopping back in the states, "this is so easy." I kind of missed the aspect of IT'S ADVENTURE TIME BABY, LET'S GO GROCERY SHOPPING, but damn it was nice just sliding back into a culture where I knew how to do things and how to respond appropriately without effort.
General sentiment still applies though, you gotta pull out your phone, type some shit in, show it to the lady, she has to type some shit in, it’s all annoying compared to just walking in and getting what you need
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I think they just mean the place you've grown up in and lived for most of your life is what you're acclimated to. You can always acclimate to something else, but that's a lifelong process and not something that fully goes away. If you're from America, you're permanently American in a lot of ways. You might miss something as simple as reminiscing about the Simpsons with someone you meet, or you might miss something that seems innocuous here like a brand of gum.
I'm from a completely reactionary shit hole in the American south and despite how much I hate it for being infested with Klansmen, meth kitchens, and overall misery, I still get a pang of regret for leaving whenever I smell pine trees. They're not coming where I live now. Looking at creeks will do that to me as well, makes me remember when I used to love my family and we'd spend nights on the sand looking at stars.
deleted by creator
Well put.
I can expand upon this for others if it might make it a little easier to understand. When I was a kid in Australia a Lebanese friend I went to school with taught me a phrase when I asked if he missed his home. There's a an Arabic or Persian word "Qarib" which means near or familiar and "Gharib" means strange or stranger and the difference in the two is often imperceptible even to native speakers in both how they're written and pronounced. I don't remember the actual phrase now and I'm sure there's multiple but it's a play on words that conveys the meaning of feeling like a stranger in a familiar place, somewhere you never felt out of place before. Longing to return home only to go and find out the longing doesn't leave. I always got the gist of what he meant but I never internalized it until I moved to the United States. I know both where I came from and where I ended up are shitty anglo empires built on the backs of genocide and I'm not here to defend the nationalism or nations themselves, that's entirely missing the point and I'd be the last person to appeal to patsoc shit.
The point I'm trying to make is the place you grew up, the place you call home even if it's through gritted teeth and seething venom, there'll be a time when you sit and realize what you left there isn't there any more. Those memories will always be in the past and they're as distant as a lost loved one. You can remember them so clearly, almost feel their echo or smell them but you can't quite ever touch them again. You're never quite "From here" in your new home, and the home you left will never come back. I still wake up over a decade later having trouble sleeping without hearing the waves. Without being able to smell sugarcane and rainforest and ocean. The stars are different. The bugs sound wrong. The sky is too closed in.
There's nothing left in my home town for me, and there won't ever be again, but I'll never belong here either. I will always be Australian in ways that the material reality I grew up in shaped and formed thoughts and feelings and emotions and experiences that will impact all kinds of things. People will never not see me as Australian either. Americans have made that exceptionally clear to me in good and bad ways but both in spades. I didn't end up a commie until after moving to the states so I can promise "in what way it impacts you" is really up to the person, but the 'flavor' of them will always be shaped by those memories and that sense of longing for something you left but know isn't waiting for you if you return.
I know this isn't a unique experience in the slightest, I've shared this conversation with friends I've made in the states from Syria, from Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, China, Trinidad, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Nepal, and they all know exactly what I mean seconds into the conversation. I understand a lot of this is still a really privileged position in the first place, especially as a white guy from a settler colonial shithole built in an invaded paradise, but it's one of the few ways in which I can ALMOST understand what it's like to feel displaced, not to compare them in scale but to be able to more easily put myself in the shoes of others and START to understand the stronger version of this they go through.
It's this that makes me feel like if you have any possibility to travel when you're young especially, do it. Leave just go where-ever the fuck else you can and see as much of the world as you're able. Meet people and try and understand the world through their eyes. Actually put yourself into the world and lose pieces of you while gaining new ones from your new experiences. Reminisce and introspect. See the world through as many other eyes as you can until you're as far away from being relatable to the anglo empire that indoctrinated you from birth that you can be. You'll forever feel that loss but that pinprick of pain will do wonders to inoculate you from closing your heart to all those you meet that the empire would otherwise have indoctrinated you to be unable to relate to. You'll always be a shitty American or a shitty Australian or whatever else but you'll also never be those things again. Not like you were.
I'm sorry if this felt dismissive of anyone who went through these feelings without having had the option of doing it as their choice. I didn't mean to bring up complex feelings or feel like my relatively privileged international move was in any way comparable, I just wanted to illustrate the best I could that it's a complex difficult thing for people who have never experienced these things, even when you don't feel like it is at the time. Even when it's just a friendly jaunt around the world it will change you forever. I would only bet far more so when the trip isn't so friendly and of your own will. Nothing but love for you all. Never stop trying to be internationalists.
That's beautiful, thank you
deleted by creator
It’s hard to explain fully, but to put it concisely it’s “culture shock”
You have to constantly be calibrating when you are immersed in a foreign culture, and that takes a lot of mental work. You make cultural blunders and don’t even know it.
Everything you want to do is harder. Let’s say you have a cold here, you go to the pharmacy and buy DayQuil or whatever. Now imagine you are sick in China, you go to the pharmacy, and you can’t read anything; none of the boxes, the signs over the aisles, anything. So you have to find a shop keeper and mime your symptoms, she hands you a box, you hope it’s right… how much do you take? What do you take it with?
You go to wash your clothes, there’s no dryer, so you have to hang it out to dry, but it’s summer and super humid so the only way to dry your stuff is on a line inside so the A/C can dry it out, and now you have clotheslines across your ceiling.
You go to cook a meal and there’s one burner.
You go to take a shower and hot water is very limited, so you have to be done in 5 minutes.
You go to take a dump in a public place and there’s a squat toilet.
These are a few examples but everything takes work. None of these things are bad per se, if you’re Chinese from China it’s just what you’re used to, no biggie. But for you it’s completely different.
It’s worth it for the experience, but there’s an ease to life that accompanies being where you are from that is easy to underestimate until you don’t have it anymore, particularly in an environment as foreign as China.
This is exactly what I was going to say. I lived in a different country for a year while I worked as an English teacher, and I both loved and hated the "everything is an adventure" aspect of daily life. Need to talk to your bank? You'd better fucking focus, because you're about to use vocabulary that you don't use on a daily basis. Going to the grocery store? Oh shit, the way they have their register set up, I can't just read the total so now I have to focus because numbers are hard because there's no context to give you a nudge if you forget a word for a second. They're making an announcement on the train? You'd better listen up, because the sound quality isn't good and there's no face to look at to help with understanding. Also, there's a big difference between knowing enough of a language and get by in daily life and being fluent enough to have real conversations beyond the weather so you can actually make friends. I'm glad I went and I had a lot of experiences I value, but it was also the loneliest I've ever been and it was really tiring. I remember landing at O'Hare and riding the tram, an announcement came over the PA system, and I realized I was understanding everything without trying, and I was just like, "holy shit this is SO EASY." Same thing the first time I went grocery shopping back in the states, "this is so easy." I kind of missed the aspect of IT'S ADVENTURE TIME BABY, LET'S GO GROCERY SHOPPING, but damn it was nice just sliding back into a culture where I knew how to do things and how to respond appropriately without effort.
Everything is Google translate now. Illiterate foreigners have never had it easier.
Oh word I didn’t think of that
General sentiment still applies though, you gotta pull out your phone, type some shit in, show it to the lady, she has to type some shit in, it’s all annoying compared to just walking in and getting what you need
Tacos. Do you like tacos? Prepare for a life without tacos.
That's just an example. There are thousands of other differences that will infuriate you in China.