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EP 52: Stranger in My Own Land: Reporting Back from the USA
1 Playsin 13 hours
Four years ago, I moved abroad. Three weeks ago, I went back for a visit.
In Episode 51, I told you I was returning to the United States with a certain degree of hesitation. I had some honest apprehensions about what I would find. And I promised to bring you back a full report.
This is that report.
After four years of living overseas, returning to your home country is not the simple homecoming you might expect. The country changes while you are away. You change too. And those two movements do not always move in the same direction.
Using the W-curve model of intercultural adjustment as our framework, this episode explores what happens when a changed self steps back into a changed place. What your fresh eyes confirm. What surprises you. And what simply stands out.
I focused on three areas. The first was scale. The United States is large. But after four years calibrated to life in Bangkok, just how large? From Jazz Fest in New Orleans to the roads of Pennsylvania, the answer became clear very quickly. The second area was social interaction. Am I still the same person in an American social environment? Has four years abroad reshaped how I engage, observe, and respond? The third area was the political and cultural atmosphere. From the news and social media, you would imagine two countries. But what does the ground actually look like?
I will not give away what I found in this description – you will have to watch! But I will tell you that some of what I expected was confirmed. And some of what I expected most, was not.
This episode is for anyone living abroad, planning to move abroad, or simply curious about what it means to return home after a long time away. Reverse culture shock is real. But so is the clarity that distance gives you.
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Website: https://auto-ethnographer.com
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Thinking about making the move overseas? My comprehensive video course, Your Ticket Abroad, was built to answer the questions I wish someone had answered for me. Filmed in Bangkok, Thailand. Available now at: https://www.auto-ethnographer.com/your-ticket-abroad-course
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Transcript
A Disorienting Return Home
00:00:01
Speaker
My disorientation, it it didn't begin on American soil. It actually began at the gate change in Seoul, South Korea. I just had come off of a Korean Airlines flight from Bangkok.
00:00:14
Speaker
The crew was attentive, courteous, helpful, smiling, and the food, even in an economy, it was fresh, it was healthy, it was prepared with quality. You sit in that cabin for 11 hours and you look and feel great. You feel looked after, you feel like a guest.
00:00:29
Speaker
And then came the handoff. Delta Airlines. The crew gave off the impression that that they had a job to do, with or without the passengers being there. It was not so receptive to requests. They were not smiling. One one could almost use the word surly to describe their behavior.
00:00:48
Speaker
And the food. It was the kind of high-carb, high-fat items that that you would expect almost stereotypically from the United States, except this was on a tray at 35,000 feet.
00:01:01
Speaker
and I hadn't even landed yet. Already, my fresh eyes were looking around and making those cultural comparisons.
Reverse Culture Shock: Strangeness at Home
00:01:11
Speaker
the autothnographer your weekly cultural trip around the world In the last episode, I told you I was heading back to the United States with a a certain degree of apprehension and hesitation.
00:01:25
Speaker
I said that I'd bring you up to date what with what I found once I got back to Bangkok, and that's where I am. And that is exactly what we're going to talk about today. My name is John Steck, and this is The Auto Ethnographer.
00:01:39
Speaker
So let me start with the question that I know you're holding. Did my hesitation match reality? Yes, to to some degree it did, and and it also didn't.
00:01:52
Speaker
I know that I have changed and and after four years of living overseas I felt somewhat of a stranger in my own land. The country certainly has changed societally and politically while I was away and and I've also developed in a different direction and that led to an even increased gap.
00:02:13
Speaker
The two moves, they they they they don't converge, they only widen in my particular case. Now in the last episode we talked about the W curve, the the the model of intercultural adjustment that that charts the the emotional arc of of going out and coming back.
00:02:30
Speaker
Well, the the W curve, it's nothing new. But in my opinion, it still works. you're You're bringing back ah a changed self to a changed place, and the the collision of those two changes is what reverse culture shock is all about.
The American Experience: Size and Spectacle
00:02:47
Speaker
But I want to be honest with you. I think that calling what I experienced really as culture shock would be a little bit too strong of a term. What I expected was more like a a persistent noticing.
00:03:01
Speaker
Noticing differences in in behavior, differences in scale, differences in sheer volume of things. Everything in the US, it seems larger, louder, and more designed to somehow trigger a reaction for for selling something, for example.
00:03:17
Speaker
like Like social media, if you think about it, ever more extreme sound bites seem to be coming out from that particular arena. Things are appearing more extreme somehow.
00:03:29
Speaker
Not la shock, not not awareness. It's it's just home-felt in-between. What once was really familiar now felt a little bit different for me.
00:03:43
Speaker
Again, i felt a little bit like a stranger in my own land to to a certain degree. I don't think I was there long enough. It was really only 11 days to have a full recalibration. But but i recalibrated quickly on one thing, the the food portion sizes.
00:04:01
Speaker
Every time I ordered a um ah meal, my my eyes confirmed exactly what I had been expecting. Immense portions compared to what I would expect in Bangkok, just tremendous.
00:04:15
Speaker
In the last episode, I told you that there were three things that I was really going to be very curious about when I walk back into the American life. The first one was scale. The second one was with social interactions. And the third was this this political societal atmosphere and how the country has changed.
00:04:33
Speaker
So let me take you through each one, starting with the scale.
00:04:39
Speaker
Big, big, big. Everything in the United States seems so oversized compared to what I see in Bangkok. So let me start first with the Jazz Fest, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
00:04:52
Speaker
13 stages all used simultaneously across this giant sprawling fairground. The scale was absolutely immense. The crowd was in the range of 50,000 people per day.
00:05:04
Speaker
I think it was 460,000 people over the course of eight days. We attended three of those days and by the end of each one, our feet were absolutely sore from from walking and from dancing.
00:05:18
Speaker
Really sore. And then there was the road. Driving a car felt so easy. Even in the worst traffic in Philadelphia and New Orleans during rush hour, it it came nowhere close to what I would call the squeeze of Bangkok. There there was so much space between the cars in those wide lanes. and And there were no scores of motorbikes filling in the spaces between the cars in Philly or New Orleans.
00:05:45
Speaker
It just felt immensely spacious on the American roads. There's one detail that also captured this for me.
00:05:56
Speaker
when when you use Google Maps while you're driving and you zoom out, you you really feel like you're moving in Thailand. You see that that that little arrow moving on the on the screen. But in the US, when you zoom out, you wonder, are you even moving at all? Because frankly, the arrow doesn't even look like it moves. It looks stationary.
00:06:17
Speaker
The distances between things are are so incredibly vast. I even looked up the numbers. So Thailand is slightly larger than California and slightly smaller than Texas. But by population, Thailand is much more densely populated. So there are about 70 million people living in Thailand, while California has 39 million and Texas has about 32 million. maybe Maybe that's why I always feel that my personal space is somehow violated
Cultural Contrasts: Cars, Contests, and Conversations
00:06:49
Speaker
over here in Bangkok.
00:06:51
Speaker
Now, as most of you know, I spent about 30 years in the auto business around the world. And and I have to tell you that the the vehicles just continue to shock me. I mean, shockingly large vehicles, nearly no hatchbacks or small sedans sold by the American brands at all anymore.
00:07:08
Speaker
But you have Tahoe and Suburban and an F-150 and Ram 1500. I'm six feet tall, 183 centimeters, and I can barely look up on the hood of these vehicles.
00:07:19
Speaker
And what I also noticed was that even in these giant cars, there's always just one person, one person. People still fill these giant cars with fuel, with gas.
00:07:31
Speaker
they're They're grumbling, but but they still fill them. The American consumers, to me, seems to have lost sight of of of how possible and even enjoyable it was to own smaller cars.
00:07:43
Speaker
And you can thank automotive marketers for that. Frankly, I'm partly to blame for that. being at the very lead of the SUV revolution back in the 1990s with Mercedes Benz.
00:07:57
Speaker
And then there was the crawfish eating contest. So we went to the annual crawfish festival in Burrowbridge, Louisiana, where contestants could eat as much crawfish as possible, minus the shells, within 45-minute time frame.
00:08:14
Speaker
The winner ended up eating over 27 pounds, or over 12 kilos of crawfish in that time. yeah There are definitely eating contests in Thailand, but but they're far less extreme. i mean Here in Thailand, people will eat for 8 minutes, not 45.
00:08:32
Speaker
And again, it just seems that everything is more extreme, bigger, larger, immense in the United States. So that was my observation on the scale.
00:08:43
Speaker
So the second thing that I was curious about was, was social interaction. You know, how would I have my recalibrated self adjust back into the American friendliness?
00:08:56
Speaker
So am I as friendly as ever? Maybe it depends, but it also depends on who is evaluating. Actually, yes, I am still as friendly as I ever was. and and And it was nice actually to be able to have a conversation with with anybody because of the common language.
00:09:17
Speaker
Generally, I have to say people were really friendly, in some cases superficially so, but but that's also something to be expected from a stereotypical standpoint. Related to that friendliness, one thing definitely has has not changed.
00:09:32
Speaker
so In American restaurant servers, as friendly as as they are, they're still interested in one thing, turning over the table and seating the next customer based on on getting their tips.
00:09:46
Speaker
I never liked that pressure to eat and then to run, and I like it even less now because here in in Thailand, nobody, Nobody is going to push you out of your table when you order something or when you don't order anything. You can just sit and talk and stay and enjoy.
00:10:05
Speaker
Overall, I am definitely a more reserved
Political Climate and Cultural Observations
00:10:09
Speaker
person by nature. I always have been. and And I like to take in and observe everything around me, not necessarily wanting to be part of of that.
00:10:18
Speaker
Living abroad didn't really change that so much. and And it did change, though, how I take that in. So now let me cover the the third arena. This was the the more challenging one, the one that I think is is is is more complex.
00:10:33
Speaker
And this is the the political and cultural atmosphere. From the news and from social media, you would think that that I'm visiting two countries in the United States, but on the ground in reality, not so much.
00:10:46
Speaker
I do want to be careful here because this is not a political podcast. Again, it's just my observations. So I was at festivals and a graduation. Those are not normal atmospheres. The the people that i I went with, they're more aligned with my my beliefs. So I have to admit that my sample of what I saw is a little bit skewed.
00:11:08
Speaker
I do want to be honest about that. But there there was one conversation that that that was had during the week. when a room was split between two factions. There there was a lightning rod topic and tension just rose immediately. two Two people, imagine two people looking at the same thing and having completely different opposing arguments on on exactly the same thing.
00:11:33
Speaker
That's how how politics has really divided the nation from from what I can tell. That moment, it it kind of confirmed my my my original apprehension. the The division there is real. It just happens to be a little bit below the surface, and it it doesn't always show itself above the plane.
00:11:53
Speaker
and And that brings me to what I would say was possibly one of my most surprising observations on the entire trip. The absence. The absence of what? In rural Louisiana, and the Deep South, it was my first visit there, so I have no earlier reference point. And then in rural Pennsylvania, where where I've been many, many times driving the same roads, I was accustomed to seeing Trump flags, truck stickers, MAGA hats.
00:12:22
Speaker
I saw none. Zero. Zero. Not a single one during the entire trip. And to me, that was a really big surprise. Now, I'm not going to try to read into why i didn't see any, because before in Pennsylvania, I saw them everywhere.
00:12:37
Speaker
This is not the podcast to analyze that, but it was just an observation that I had surprising that there were none. Before I left to go back home to to Thailand, I'd carried a set of stereotypes.
00:12:54
Speaker
large trucks, loud talking, consumerism, huge portions, overweight people, political division, all confirmed except I would say the last one. The political division, it's there, but it's not necessarily visible above the surface, which I have to admit was a little bit of a relief for me during the 11 days that I was on the ground.
00:13:17
Speaker
So let me let me recap here quickly, kind of the the scorecard, if you want to call it that. So the the stereotypes that I that I carried, almost all were confirmed. The one that I expected that was most apprehensive about the the political division, at least on the surface, it's not confirmed.
00:13:34
Speaker
um At least not in the time, the limited time, or in the spaces that I visited when I was there. Now I can say that that the division certainly exists, but it sits below the surface and it's waiting to be triggered by something, anything.
Economic Realities and Personal Milestones
00:13:50
Speaker
And that brings me to what unsettled me the most. it It wasn't the the the emotional price of politics. It was actually the the price of everything.
00:14:03
Speaker
everyday items, food, fuel, everything. It's no secret that inflation and high prices are all over the news media median in the United States.
00:14:16
Speaker
and And indeed it was true. At the Jazz Festival in New Orleans and at the Crawfish Festival, $6 for a soft pretzel. An iced tea in a large cup was $8. And then there were various Cajun and Creole themed sandwiches that were running from $15 to $25. And there were lines. People queued up waiting for this. They they didn't seem to show any kind of a a hesitation to pay these prices.
00:14:41
Speaker
You know, from from my perspective here in Bangkok, you know, my wife and I, we can go out for local Thai food in Bangkok and and and we can have a complete meal with adult beverages for 10 to $20.
00:14:54
Speaker
But at the fair, just a drink and a sandwich was between 20 to $30 for a single person. and And still people just bought right into it. For me, it seemed painful to be honest.
00:15:06
Speaker
And thinking about consumerism, the stores they were they were full of shoppers despite the complaints of rising prices. Large houses, large cars, and and things of course have to be bought to fill those.
00:15:21
Speaker
Thai homes by comparison are much more more simple and spartan inside. The American consumer engine, meanwhile, it just keeps running. But I have to say there was a surprise in this area of pricing as well.
00:15:35
Speaker
So with the with the current high price of fuel in the US, I expected that there would be business as usual and that people would grumble at the pump but still fill up their cars. But instead, I noticed that people talked about alternatives, commuting by rail, working from home, cutting back on the trips they make.
00:15:52
Speaker
People were actually talking about solutions on using less fuel. and And that's something new to me because in the past when I saw peaks and high prices, behavior didn't change, except for the grumbling at the pump.
00:16:08
Speaker
What grounded me while I was over there? Well, I had i had mentioned two major milestones that transcend culture, and they also frankly transcended the the price tags of everything and that I saw. First of all, my daughter, she graduated from medical school, and she was announced as doctor, MD.
00:16:29
Speaker
Congratulations, Dr. Steck. And that's not all. My son and his fiancee, both of them 24 years old, they bought their first home together. Pride and in in children's accomplishments I think that transcends country and culture. It it transcends the the the whole dissonance of of re-entry and the, I have to say, that the international upbringing of my kids, the eight years that they had in Egypt and Russia, the international schools, that the dozens of nationalities of children in those schools, that that broad worldview that they gained through that, it still lives within their hearts, even as they're setting up their lives in the United States.
00:17:15
Speaker
And that, I think, is where the word the word the word home becomes the the hardest word that I carry.
The Meaning of Home and Identity
00:17:23
Speaker
Home is where your stuff is.
00:17:26
Speaker
I've said that one before. I fully believe in that from a practical sense. yeah My stuff is in Bangkok. My daily life is in Bangkok. My rhythm, my my routines, my waking up, my going to sleep, all of that now happens in Thailand.
00:17:44
Speaker
But is the United States still my home? It is where I was raised. It is where I was educated. It is where I worked for decades and where I raised a family, at least some of the time. we were also abroad. those Those roots don't pull up very easily. And and and frankly, they shouldn't.
00:18:03
Speaker
They architected who I am. and yet, in the last episode I said that I was changing rapidly as much as my own country was changing and in different directions.
00:18:17
Speaker
Now i've I've seen it firsthand. Over the long haul, there there there is definitely a growing apart. There's not a rupture. There's definitely not a rejection.
00:18:28
Speaker
There's just something quieter. It's like a a tectonic drift. It's when when you have the two tectonic plates, they're moving slowly, maybe they move together, maybe they move apart.
00:18:40
Speaker
I think that's what I'm experiencing myself. distance gave me the clarity to confirm or to cancel my expectations. The stereotypes that I carried, most of them i think were confirmed. The political division, which I had dreaded, was was not so outwardly visible, which frankly was a tremendous ah tremendous relief on my side.
00:19:02
Speaker
The prices, the scale of everything, the consumerism, I think those were inescapable. and and and And the incredible surge in prices, that was what unsettled me the most. 60% 75% lower cost of living in Thailand makes the American price tag feel really high, especially now with this runaway inflation.
00:19:29
Speaker
But the the dissonance, the thing that I... The feeling that I had before I left, it's it's it's it's still not about the the country at all. It's it's really about me. That was true before the trip, and it's certainly true now that I'm back in Bangkok.
00:19:45
Speaker
The changed self, it meets the changed place. and And the space between them is is where my observation lies. That's where I see things differently. And and that's where that stranger in the homeland has to reside now.
00:20:03
Speaker
As I said, what surprised me most, the political division was not outwardly visible, and and what unsettled me the most, the incredible surge in in prices, what grounded me the most was my children.
00:20:21
Speaker
Two milestones that reminded me that some things translate far beyond cultural observation because they're universal. I have American friends and and family, of course, that i hope to to keep for the rest of my life. and And I have Thai friends and Egyptian friends and I have i Russian friends and Vietnamese friends and and and even friends from other dozens of countries who have helped to shape who I am and and who have made me what I am to- today.
00:20:53
Speaker
The word home sits at the center of all of that. And and I think at least for now, the honest answer is that that that home is not it's not one place. It's the sum of all the places that I've been and all of the people who have made me. And and when I step closer, i can really appreciate what that sum has become.
00:21:17
Speaker
My name is John Steck, the auto ethnographer. Stay curious and keep on driving. Thank you for joining us on today's journey.
00:21:28
Speaker
Please remember to like and subscribe to The Auto Ethnographer and leave us a rating or comment. For more information, visit our website at auto-ethnographer.com. You can also follow on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.