Cultural Anomalies — those Living between the Eastern and the Western World
Those of us that drift between the East and the West, quite a lot of us I have come to known during my 21 years in the Western world — in America and Europe.
We live in the chasm between two cultures, never completely fitting in one culture or the other. Parts of us will forever be Eastern, and parts of us evolved in the Western society that we lived in. We have learned and adapted, grew new parts of ourselves.
Years ago, I wrote a paper in an anthropology class, calling people like this ethnic anomalies. The topic interested me because I realized I’ve become an anomaly as such.
Those of us from the East, who adapted to the lifestyle of the West — I’ve found — find the Western lifestyle lonely.
We come from an Eastern world, a world that is like a beehive, as my western psychoanalyst calls it — a world where people are everywhere, you are part of a group, whether you like it or not. Things just happen to you.
Your days are filled with obligations, engaging them, skillfully rejecting them, making matters as harmonious as they can be. You want to fit in. It’s assumed that you think for other people. Everything you do should take in consideration of how others would perceive and feel. Not to stand out too much, is a good thing.
When we come to the west, all that beehive isn’t there anymore. We are left alone in an individualistic society, when we are used to a collective sort of society. Things don’t happen to you automatically anymore. You are left to yourself. Sometimes, you don’t know what to do with yourself.
In an individualistic society, you go for what you want, you do things for yourself. You have goals, personal goals, based on your personal aspirations and history. You try to know yourself and stand out from the crowd. Everything is based in yourself, not the group, not the collective. You voice out your opinion, you fight those that are in your way.
Life becomes lonely for us who were used to the Eastern way of living, because all of a sudden, we don’t belong. We are deprived of the beehive that was around us. The people, the group, the collective, and all of a sudden, we are left with all that time and space for ourselves. And for most of us, at first, don’t know what to do with ourselves and this time.
Western culture has developed this way so people leave time to develop themselves, much more with their souls and spirits. Things run much slower in Western societies, in low context societies — one-thing-at-a-time, mono-chronic societies, where the people learned to do one thing at a time. In Eastern culture, multiple things happen at the same time. This high, low context term was invented by the American Anthropologist Edward Hall.
In Western societies, there are less people involved in your life, less engagements between people, relationships are fewer compare to Eastern societies, but often times deeper.
In Easter societies, relationships are abundant, but shallower in depth. A person fulfills their needs by many different people, so each of them do not have to satisfy many needs, it’s the collective as a whole that fulfills the need. I think this is the reason emotional connection is more demanded on a partnership in the west.
Those of us from the East learn a new way of living, especially the ones on their own. Here in the west, there are not that many people around all the time, things are closed on Sundays, after work hours, we learn to deal with this time alone. Much of this loneliness is soul suffering, for people from the East, where the idea of loneliness does not exist in the same way it does in the west. We learn to develop ourselves with this time. We devote into work. We have all this time that in the Eastern beehive world, we don’t have for ourselves.
A person stripped off of its original culture and context, faces loneliness, and transforms that loneliness into something that would not have if they had not come to live in the Western world.
