A beautiful, clear day at the cottage we stayed at in B.C.

We’ve past the one month mark in Canada now and simple things like figuring out how to release one grocery cart from the long chain, or how to pay with a credit card, seem less intimidating. But the first week Brian and I had to slow down, observe people around us and try to remember how to do some of these day to day tasks.

My first time in the SevenOaks mall in Abbotsford sticks out to me the most. I walked into Ricki’s and there were two customers talking to the sales clerk. I remember thinking, “Why are they talking to her, they don’t even know her.” In China there are so many people in a store, the clerk would never have time to stop and talk with someone.

To help you understand my train of thought, when we are in China, we devote ourselves to trying to understand the culture and acting appropriately. We have worked so hard on it that when we come back to Canada things that once seemed so normal feel strange and foreign, like these ladies talking to the sales clerk. In fact, I had been in this same store several times when I lived in Abbotsford and had probably heard a sales clerk converse with a customer and thought nothing of it.

This is reverse culture shock.

But it wasn’t just that they were talking, since Chinese is my second language and I need to work hard to understand it I can easily tune out conversation around me. But not English, I could understand every word they were saying. Since I’m not used to this anymore, it is an adjustment and becomes overwhelming.

Another thing is I can never go unnoticed in a store in China. People look at me, talk about me and point at me. So to be able to just slip into a store in Canada, browse around and have no one even look at me was nice, but so unusual. Not only that, I haven’t been in a store in Canada for three years so I was looking at the unusual styles trying to decide if I could ever wear them. And then there were the prices, unbelievably high.

So there I was, processing the way people were relating to each other in the store, the conversation that I could so clearly understand, how I was received, what people were wearing, how prices have changed and how they compare to Chinese clothing prices, but the people in the store didn’t have a clue what was going through my mind. They probably thought that I lived in the area and just dropped in to check out the sales rack. They had no idea who I was.

Meanwhile, the customers at the till were still chatting away. I thought, “What if they talk to me?” I had no idea what I would say. I obviously couldn’t tell them all that was going through my mind and I didn’t trust myself to sort through this avalanche of thoughts to be able to put together a few intelligent sentences, so I slipped out of the store as quietly as I had come in.

I spent another hour and a half in the mall, forcing myself to make decisions on necessary purchases and holding off any others until I had time to adjust. By the end I had taken in so many faces, clothing styles (Flip flops in February? Every Chinese grandmother in sight would have been after that girl!) and tattoo choices.

My mind had worked itself to the point of exhaustion. Ready to go home and rest, I walked by the food court, making my way to the exit. There was a large group of Asian people sitting at a long table. Looking over at them I smiled and had the urge to pull up a chair and sit beside them. It seemed that out of anything I had done that day, that would be the most natural, normal thing to do.

Then, I thought, I would feel “at home”.