Reverse culture shock: Feeling like a fish out of water
“Let’s go Skinny Pizza!”
I furrow my brow and go, “What’s Skinny Pizza?”
“It’s a restaurant that sells pizza with very thin crust.”
“Hmm, okay.”
I just go with the flow when I go back to Singapore for visits. Today’s discussion is about the unrelenting weirdness that never shakes off when you go back to your home country for a visit. As much as experiencing the new is part of your life in your adopted country, going back can also feel “new”…
During my last visit to the little Red Dot, I felt as if I were morphing in and out of surreal scenes on the MRT, jostling among pedestrians on Orchard Road, talking to friends about parking fees and ERP.
“You feel like a stranger in your adopted home and a tourist in your own home country. If you tell anyone that, they’ll be like, ‘How snobby!’” a friend who repatriated back to Singapore recently said. I have to agree that many other folks not in these shoes would think you making much ado about nothing. You’ve gone abroad and now you dare say you are/feel like a foreigner?!
But it is something. You have two homes but you don’t really feel 100 per cent at home in either.
For example, I was wrestling with the Japan Post customer service the other day and for the life of me I couldn’t get the lady over the line to understand what Kuwait meant. QUEUE-way-to, queue-WAY-TO, QUEUE-WAY-TO, KOO-WAAAY-TO…I tried different intonations and pronunciations, so in the end I said, “Saudi Arabia no chikaku desu (It’s near Saudi Arabia).” Still nada. I gave up and so did she.
Back to my visit in Singapore, I had no idea what Skinny Pizza was until I had one. For a skinny pizza, it was very filling. The folks at House were very generous with the mushrooms and the kangaroo lapped it up when I presented the rest of my uneaten pizza to him in a doggie bag.
Here are pictures of my dinner at House (Skinny Pizza has branches in Wheelock Place and Suntect City). I know you love food porn…
Parsnip veloute with fried mushrooms.
Truffle fries. These were really good.
Fruity champagne cocktail in a tiffin.
Singapore is developing at lightning speed so even with six-month intervals between my visits, some buildings would’ve disappeared and last season’s “in” bar would be this season’s no man’s land. The taxi fares have jumped two-fold and it’s not cheap to wave a cab down to flee from the hot humidity anymore.
There are also imperceptible changes in family members and friends that are only apparent when you see them in person. It could be a new interest you never knew they had, or they overhauled the entire living room so it became unrecognizable (my folks, obviously), or new habits/hairstyles/jobs/businesses they acquired. I’ve also lost touch with ex-colleagues and friends whom I weren’t very close with — all inevitable and par for the course.
Sometimes I wish I could be there to see the changes but I need to go back to my reality, Tokyo, which constantly looks like a scene out of a William Gibson novel. My work is here so it makes sense to live here. For now, anyway…
Do you feel like a stranger at home too?
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March 2nd, 2010 at 8:41 pm
I been trying to get to Singapore for awhile now. Any good jobs over there? Im from the U.S. Japan aint my deal been here over 16 years.
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:16 am
Hmm…Singapore has many opportunities, esp finance and engineering. But I heard that the govt is very selective of hiring foreigners for now because the locals cannot find jobs due to the recession. It was announced in the newspapers so it’s quite an accurate snapshot of what’s going on.