Culture Clash

 This is a picture of a rice paddy in Cambodia, taken from the web.  It shows one aspect of how we lived and the source of our main staple, rice.








The biggest culture clash that I've experienced and witnessed has got to be when we first came to America.  We came in 1980.  We came from a very agragrian type of society that would be considered non-developed or under-developed nation.  We basically lived off the land and lived day to day hunting, gathering, and growing our own food.  There were no electricity or plumbing where we lived.  When our country was war stricken we had to drop everything and leave.  I was much younger then but my family expected to be able to return once the war was over.  What we did not realize was that the war took much longer than we anticipated and circumstances led us here.

On the plane, my mother had extreme motion sickness.  We had only the clothing that we wore and a few small items that we took with us.  I know that my mother was worried about how we were going to live here in the U.S.  "We did not know the language.  We never lived in a city before so how would we do in a city of an advanced country?  How will we learn to cope, communicate, and function as regular people?"  These were the things on our mind while we were on that long flight.

When we got here, it was winter.  I was afraid of the escalator so after everyone was already off the escalator, I was still at the top trying to figure out when it was safe enough to put my feet down.  Luckily, there was an older man that we knew who came back to carry me on the escalator.  My brother was wearing my grandfather's boxers because he had only one pair of pants and he had wet it on the plane.  After a long travel, we finally went to our new crowded apartment which we shared with five families.  It was a good thing that my aunts and uncles, two couples, did not have any children yet.  There were seven children, including me, living in the same apartment.

The most memorable time was when someone told us that it was snowing outside.  We had never seen snow before and we did not know it looked like.  I imagined that it must be cubes of ice that drop from the sky.  I remember thinking that it would hurt if we were outside.  When we went out to see the actual thing, it was fluffy and made up of small ice shave like particles.  Some people actually made frozen drinks out of it.  This was all new and exciting to us and the beginning of many explorations and learning opportunities.