I immigrated to Vietnam. That was ok.
Visiting north America again years later was quite a shock!
Going home after living abroad was a way bigger shock to me than living abroad was too. You suddenly see your own culture from outside.
Ack, my long response got eaten.
I guess in North America, people I know seem to think that developing countries in Asia are these oppressive, miserable places.
While I do technically live in a slum, it’s safer and the residents are happier than any place I’ve been in Canada. The people here have so much freedom to do the things that matter! The barrier to starting a business is very close to zero, zoning and tax laws are not prohibitive either. You can do whatever you want with your home – no home owner’s association. Raise chickens on your roof, if that’s what you want to do. Anything not dangerous is OK – maybe talk to your neighbors first if it’s something unusual.
Going back to North America is something I do for family. It’s inconvenient, everything is far apart and empty, it feels dead. The food is less good. People are angry and divided about politics. There’s some low-but-everpresent degree of hostility towards people who look like foreigners, and overall it seems people have somewhat strange ideas about Asia. It’s not terrible, and there are many good things there too (it is clean and many forests!), but I feel woefully out of place.
Interacting with people from North America who visit Vietnam has always been the biggest cultural shock though. Often, they outright ask me how to commit crimes (I maintain a presence online to answer questions for confused tourists – Vietnam is not that accessible sometimes). Work permit compliance is low, also many fake university degrees and fake passports. Lots of people running MLM and crypto scams. Many drive without any valid license, and if they hit someone they flee back home. I met many selling drugs illegally (I wasn’t looking for them, either). It used to be shockingly bad. On the bright side, it drove me to integrate culturally and pay careful attention to my immigration paperwork.
So I guess I consider myself culturally Asian now, which I suppose is a reasonable outcome after 10 years. The language is still hard for me though, I still speak like a child – running a business doesn’t leave so much time to study human languages.
Nowadays, we’re getting more qualified professionals and tourists that are decent people, so things are generally way better than they were 5 or 6 years ago. Overall the things I’ve seen make me ashamed though. I don’t think any amount of progress can really wash that feeling away. I try to assist tourists online as a way to prevent myself from turning that shame into prejudice.
If you can afford it, I found that the Pimsleur technique taught me how to speak well better than anything else I tried. I’ve forgotten the Spanish I know because I didn’t keep using it, but it got me to a decent adult conversational level in about a month at half an hour a day and I was always speaking ‘adult’ sentences right from the start, both copying then making new ones.
