A Trip Down Memory Lane

My Biggest Experience of Culture Shock

As a traveller I have certainly experienced culture shock a few times. But you might be surprised at where I dealt with it the most by far.

It wasn’t from my first night in Bangkok seeing girls behind red partitions with numbers attached. It wasn't in some Buddhist temple either. My greatest culture shock didn't occur on the foot of a volcano in a Guatemalan village or in some byzantine Chinese airport. It was much closer to home, like as in the USA.

It wasn't a Hollyweird party or being stranded in a mormon town in Utah that got to me. Closer. The greatest culture shock I ever experienced began when my parents drove me to my college dorm room in Ohio when I was 18 years old. They had borrowed my brothers rustbucket Buick as their car was broken at the time. The shock began immediately.

There was a meet and greet outside of the residence hall. I was staying in a quad, meaning a dorm room with three other girls. Everyone seemed nice enough until one of my roommate’s father had the audacity to drive up front with a car he was gifting to his daughter for her entry into college. She was aghast.

“I wanted a Beretta!” She cried that night to one of the other roommates who lended her a sympathetic ear. Her father was a cheapskate, you see.

Now for me, having come to Otterbein college in an old car that my parents had borrowed from my brother, I found this confusing. “Your Dad gave you a car!” I told her that night. “That is really cool!”

“It's horrible!” She cried back. “Nobody is going to notice me in that ugly green thing! I'm embarrassed to even drive it!”

And thus my journey into culture shock began. It was going to be a long way down.

Otterbein college, a small private institution in Westerville, Ohio on the outskirts of Colombus, was, at the time, the most expensive university in the state. I didn't care about that at all, as I had been awarded a scholarship to attend which along with my Pell grants had almost, but not entirely, covered the cost of tuition. I had decided on there based on the unusual matrix of it being in state, offering a robust fine arts program, and also having the unusual major of equine management. I was all about the horses back then.

I immediately joined a work program as as a stable hand. Every morning at 5 AM a woman drove me and a few other young people to the college stables. They were always careful to make sure I didn't go over part time status as a full time student so I was capped at 19.45 hours. I was paid minimum wage of $5.25 per hour. I started socking money away immediately.

My roommates were nice enough at first, but they always seemed to have I broke a nail type of drama. I guess it’s called first world problems nowadays. One had a boyfriend in Colombus and barely stayed in the room, while the other two became bff's. They invited me to a fraternity party in my first week. It wasn't really my crowd.

This all came to head oddly enough because of a required course that both me and one of the roommates were in. I can't remember if it was called English literature or Creative Writing or English 101 or what it was. The professor, one Dr. Nancy Bowman, challenged us all to a trust building exercise. She wanted us to write an essay about something that had happened that had been impactful on our life. These essays would then be shared with a group of three other students who would read them and provide feedback.

We were reading “Them” by Joyce Carol in her class at the time. It was raw and real and resonated with me strongly. I thought about an incident with Beth and words flew off the page in my essay.

I was assigned to a group with three other girls, one of whom was my roommate in the dorm, the one with the cheapskate father who wanted the Beretta. I'd never written anything this personal before. The other girls’ essays were rather boring and prosaic and told me little about them. One, perhaps eying a future commencement speech, was all about how being accepted to Otterbein College had opened the door to the future. We all gave friendly encouraging feedback but there wasn't much to say. They were pretty unmemorable.

My essay came last. It was a lot longer than the other ones. I tried to gage their faces as they read.

My roommate gave feedback first. “Like, my hands were shaking as I read this. This really happened to you? Like, for real real?”

I was taken aback. All the girls had stories like this where I grew up. They just wouldn't share them as the trauma was too great. “Yes.” I said finally.

“So you grew up like, super poor?”She questioned.

It was a bit more nuanced than that but it was a fair assessment. A good amount of my government subsidies and grants to attend the rich girl's college were based on my parent's extremely low income status. “Yes. I guess you could say that.” I had inadvertantly signed my own death warrant to that particular social climber.

The second girl gave her feedback. “You are like an unbelievable author. I could not stop reading this. “ This exact praise would be given to me by professor Bowman the next morning outside of class as she smoked her cigarette. She wanted me to change my major from equine management to creative writing. Dr Bowman became my mentor at the college. I often hung out talking to her smoking cigarettes before class.

The third girl took a critical tone. “So this friend of yours, this Beth character, where is she now?”

I shrugged this off. “I don’t know. I heard a rumor that she went to Florida. I haven’t seen her in years.”

“Do you think she would be okay with you writing about her getting raped upstairs? You’re kind of violating her privacy.”

I sighed. “I don’t know how to write this type of story without talking about what happened.”

“But maybe she doesn’t want you talking about it.” The girl was raising her voice now. She took this personally for some reason.

“Look none of the girls I grew up with can talk about what happened to them. I want to be a voice for some of these stories.” Class was finished and I gathered my backpack. “None of that stuff should have ever happened to her. I think silence only protects the perpetrators.”

The girl dropped her query. “You still should have asked her permission.” That was assuming I could even find Beth to ask. I still wonder if I saved her life that night by hopping in the car when Carl tried to drive away with her. He demanded to know who had hurt her and what they had done. Beth was legitimately scared of him and not too long afterwards he ended up being convicted of triple homicide, which kicked off after he first strangled his girlfriend to death.

A few days later one of my roommates accused me a stealing spare change from her nightstand in the room. The two roommates who had become BFFs had a theory that I had needed a few bucks to buy cigarettes or something. Being that I was poor and all, the only way I could get this money was by stealing it.

To this day I have no idea if the two BFFs schemed this way to get me out of the room or if they genuinely believed that I had taken a few dollars worth of change. Two of the girls had boyfriends who were in and out of the room and with four of us in there there was a lot of traffic. I wouldn’t blame them for wanting me out of the room as it was crowded. With the two roommates becoming BFFs and the third girl gone a lot I was the odd woman out.

I had no idea what happened to their money but I guarantee I didn’t take it. “Thou Shalt not Steal” is actually the least populated space on my Sins against the Ten Commandments bingo card. Oh sure, there was this time when I was five or six years old where my mom wouldn’t buy me a pack of gum in a store that I wanted. I slyly put the gum in my hands, but Mom figured it out when she found me chewing gum in a tree in back. She immediately called my father and they both marched me into the store right up to the manager where I was forced to confess to my theivery. The store manager agreed not to call the police just this once as long as I promised never to steal again. My career as a thief was thus foiled at a very young age.

The roommates insisted on having a meeting with the RA about this situation. If they had schemed this scenario to get me kicked out the quad, they were convincing actresses. They insisted that they wanted to press charges and worried what else I might steal in the future from them. They had an open and shut case. Despite having many other potential people who could have taken change off the nightstand I was the only one who fit the bill because I was poor. Since I’d grown up poor, I obviously didn’t have any money and needed it.

There was something pathetic about their lowly characterization of me. It seemed their character sketch relied on a lot of stereotypes about the poor and the working class that I henceforth hadn’t even known existed. They were sure I had needed a few dollars to buy some off brand cigarettes. I tried to explain to the RA that I had a job and had plenty of money to buy my own smokes. I only made a hair over $100 per week, but I had a full meal plan in the College cafeteria. I didn’t have a car and didn’t go out to BW3s of Chili’s or have fast food wrappers littering the floor like they did. At that time I did smoke, but only one or maybe two packs per week at most. I did buy some cheap off brand that cost a buck or two, but that was more because I had made a conscious decision that if I was going to pollute my lungs with that crap, at least I shouldn’t pay a premium for it. One of the other girls in the room smoked also, but I think it was Benson and Hedges or something. I bummed a cigarrette off of her once, asking her first, of course. I didn’t like the menthol taste of it.

A lot of the money I was spending was going towards long distance phone calls to my boyfriend, my high school sweetheart, back in Toledo. My spending was at about $20 per week though and I was socking money away.

The RA explained calmly to my roommates that she could not call the police to press charges on a suspected theft of less than $50. However, she could see that the situation was toxic and that I needed to get out of the dorm room. The Resident Advisor wrote up a short report explaining that I was, and I quote, “psychologically incompatible with other people.” I was so angry about that at the time.

This report had a silver lining, however. Because I was psychologically incompatible with others, I needed to stay in a dorm room alone. So I got moved to the singles girls dorm residence hall, which was populated by a combination of foreign exchange students and those whose parents had been willing to shell out several thousand extra bucks at the already priciest college in Ohio so their dear daughter could have some privacy. It was an ironic twist of fate.

By merit of being accused of being so poor that I had to steal spare coins from my roommate so I could buy a $1.50 pack of smokes, I got to move in with the really rich kids.

The culture shock was still just setting in…perhaps I should write a part 2 about the dressage girls. What do you all think?

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