Pre-Culture Shock :-P

If I had to put into words (but which words?) the reasons behind this semester's difficulty, I would have to say that the cause is that every day makes me more vividly conscious of speaking another language- not only in the physical sense, but mentally, culturally, metaphorically. I sit in a room with family or friends, talking with them in English, but in my head, I'm translating to French, with exclamations and scattered words in Chinese. To hear one symphony is exquisite, but three symphonies at once is a cacophany. My ears are ringing at every moment with a cacophany which only I can hear. When I was a five year old entertaining myself by chanting the two or three French words my father taught me in a smug sing-song, when I was eight years old promising with reckless naivette to learn every language in the world, when a three year brush with Latin became a window for me into fairyland, I didn't know what it meant to pursue such a dream over years and years. I still don't. But they never told me, then, what we were giving up- that the price of belonging everywhere was to belong nowhere, that the more we could express to the globe, the less we could explain even the simplest things to the ones left behind at home, what it would feel like to have a head swarming and teeming with thoughts in three tongues, like paints on an artist's palette, mingling and flowing together till colors were formed that exist nowhere in reality, and are invisible to all other eyes. To be fluent in multiple languages has always been for me, the most magical thing in the world, but it's a terribly desolate magic at times- a one way ticket into Narnia. The end, I begin to realize, of persevering through culture shock, and finishing what I've begun, is to dwell on the fringe of multiple universes, and have no part in any of them. After choosing a life of wild adventure, there's no way of trotting cozily back home and returning to normalcy as though nothing had passed.


'That the Lamb who was slain might have the full reward of His suffering', the creations of the culture-creating God choose a lifetime of culture shock gladly. It is because of Him, and not because of this, that we will never be the same. It is a people transformed by joy who choose the agony of transformation across cultures and languages. No retreats- No reserves- No regrets.