Inside-Outside-In

Culture shock. I haven't written about it in a very, very long time--since January, unless you count my recent musings on perspective shift, which I don't. The reason why I've stopped is pretty obvious: I have ceased to be shocked by the culture.

Sure, I still notice little quirks like misspelled shirts and "Indian"-Spanish-Chinese singers at Taiwanese holiday celebrations. But I'm pretty sure I'd notice those no matter where I was. The huge in-your-face cultural differences are now pretty much invisible to me, something I had somewhat forgotten and have recently been reminded of, since Ingrid came to join our little Hanmin teaching family and I got to see her reactions to them.

In fact, I now believe I've been in Taiwanese culture enough to somewhat internalize it. How did I come to this conclusion? Well, apart from all the not-exactly-ironic peace sign posing I've been doing for months...

January...

March...

Today I realized (thanks to a Facebook post by one of my ETA colleagues in Yilan, Lauren) that I have also been incorporating the culture into my daily life on a more subtle level. Here's the link that prompted this realization.

Yes, it's a meme of Asians taking pictures of their food. It's pretty accurate; whenever I actually pay attention at restaurants (Rachel's especially good at noticing this), I see people everywhere with their cameras out and pointed alternately at themselves and at their food. Rachel told me she and Brittany saw one person in Taipei taking a picture of herself with...her fork. Pictures of food, and food-related objects and poses, are all over here.

And let's see...what have I been writing about lately? Constantly; almost obsessively, in fact? ALWAYS with pictures? Here I was thinking it was about my American culture, but as it turns out, it may just be a result of my sneaking internalization of the local culture. To say "hello" in Taiwanese, after all, you literally say "have you eaten"! Food is absolutely central to Taiwanese culture. So, really, why does this realization surprise me?

Maybe because it's such a perfect cohesion of American and Taiwanese cultures; I never saw it coming. I may do a whole series on how much I miss sandwiches, but the fact is I've taken food, something I never paid all that much attention to in the States, and elevated it to one of my most common subjects.

Fulbright talks ad nauseum about our role as cultural ambassadors and as "a bridge between cultures." And, well, I suppose you can't get much more bridge-like than by complexly intertwining American and Taiwanese cultures; combining external and internal elements and placing them, subconsciously, in your day-to-day life. Is it outside? Is it in? The answer is like that of Schroedinger's cat: yes.