完形填空
Ask
your foreign friends or teachers whether they experienced" culture
shock" upon moving to China. 1 are, they did.
According
to a survey, eighty-five percent of international students have had culture shock.
Culture shock is a broad term for the series of personal difficulties that
people go through in new places, for the surrounding environment is so
different from that where they grow up. It's usually most extreme for those who
can't speak the language of the place to which they have 2 or for those who aren't familiar with the
social rules, such as what you should do if you meet people for the first time.
Both of these things happened to me in China when I moved there in 2011.
So
as you can imagine, naturally, I went through the four well-known3 of culture shock: honeymoon, distress,
re-integration and autonomy.
When
I arrived at first, I was 4 and. optimistic, I thought I was well-prepared
for this new life in the new country, and I was eager to find out what I was going
to experience later. But quickly I became upset by the cultural differences I encountered,
missing how things5 back home.
By
the end of my first year, I had totally lost my self-confidence; I was a
bitter, clumsy and sensitive person, and I blamed China for making me that way.
Then,
in my second year, I started to6 some language skills, and I found fun
activities to do in my spare time, I made great foreign and Chinese friends,
and with their help, I tried hard to learn to appreciate the beauty of Chinese
history and culture, which was the thing I always wanted to achieve. To my
delight, I succeeded in 7 an
interest in them. And afterwards, I learned to consider myself a confident and
happy laowai.
Today
I'm back in the US, where I'm pursuing a PhD at a university in my hometown.
It's been a little 8to readjust to life in my home country,
I suffered at first from "reverse" culture shock, experiencing the
four stages in the opposite order.
I
started out feeling independent and self-confident, before slowly realizing
that I knew my country much less well than I used to. I'd complain loudly about
little things, like how I could no longer shout "fuwuyuan!" to get
waiters'9 to let them know that I was ready to order in
a restaurant.
But
eventually, I came to realize that what I had thought was my "home" had
become an entirely new place while I'd been away. That, by itself, was
exciting.
