What is culture shock?
Culture shock is the anxiety and feelings (of surprise, disorientation, uncertainty, confusion, etc.) felt when people have to operate within a different and unknown culture such as one may encounter in a foreign country. It grows out of the difficulties in assimilating the new culture, causing difficulty in knowing what is appropriate and what is not. This is often combined with a dislike for, or even disgust (moral or aesthetic) with certain aspects of the new or different culture (www.wikipedia.org).
As a foreigner have you ever experienced this?
Personally, staying in Malaysia I do not experience much cultural problems. As Malaysia and Indonesia share similar culture roots. However, we all know that Malaysia has multicultural environment and this has helped me to learn from all interactions and observations with many people from diverse countries, race, religion, etc. It might be not so much "Culture shock" for me and overall of this topic only my opinion.
I should put my words carefully here...What I have noticed is the race discrimination is very obvious in Malaysia either it is personal prejudice or in the workplace. This has made me a little uncomfortable because this topic always comes in the daily conversation, website, newspaper, etc. On the surface, it looks peaceful but if we are going deeper a lot of issues appeared. How they judge a person from skin, from your face feature, from what nationality and keep mentioning what race you are. Why it is so important?
It was pretty annoying because I have an Indian name with Chinese looking. They thought I was Malaysian-Chinese or Indian-Chinese ( =_= )'' because of that I had to explain where I do come from and why I have Indian name instead of Chinese name so many times..
Also, there are Chinese culture, local, Indian culture of organization. For local company there are more Malays and so does Chinese company. In short, people create the organization culture and they would prefer to hire people who share the same attitude and culture. Another thing that heaps of peope complain is customer service manner. It is very rare to see customer service or shop assistants always smile, greet you, or say Thank you. "Customer is not a King".
In my country, we also have this problem and it is a huge country with hundreds ethnic, races, and religion. People are having their own prejudice towards particular ethnic. Foreigners are scared when they see news about ethnic war, bombings and how unsafe my country. But, indeed no matter what race are you, we always say we are from one nationality. We do not emphasize I'm Indonesian-chinese here or she is another Indonesian-....( any race). And the funniest one, a Malaysian-Chinese told me that he did not know there are lots of Indonesian-Chinese in Indonesia. And again, I have to tell them how huge and diverse people that my country has.
In the end, this is just my story. We can not judge or generalize my thought about a country or race. Malays, Chinese, or Indians they are good and expecially in my class everyone is friendly, welcome and very helpful. The thing is how open our mind by not judging people from their skin color, race and religion?
