“Reculturalization” isn’t a term in the dictionary, but it is a word that I have come to use to describe my returning here from a semester in China. 

A lot of study abroad participants find that returning home is not as easy as they expect.  A student who lives abroad for several months or a year has enough time for “foreign” surroundings to begin to feel quite familiar, and to ease into patterns of living that become very comfortable, even automatic.  This adjustment to local conditions deepens if the design of the study abroad program keeps the student in the same location for most of the time he or she is abroad.  The end result is that the student can feel like he or she has adopted the study abroad location as a new “home”.   

I experienced this as part of a study abroad program organized by the Purdue Hospitality and Tourism Department.  I was part of a group that spent the fall semester of 2006 in one Chinese city – Jinling – where we all did an internship at the same hotel.  And in addition to working in the hotel, we lived there, too.  So this particular hotel in this particular city became, for a time, the center of our world. 

As time passed, the way we referred to this place changed.  Before we arrived in China, we referred to it by using its formal, commercial name.  But after we arrived, no one in our group called it anything but “the hotel”.  And after a couple of months in China, we all found that if we were out in the city and getting ready to go in for the night, we were all referring to the hotel as “home”. 

And we found, at the end of our program, that leaving “home” can be hard. 

When we returned to Indiana, it was almost heartbreaking to realize that we no longer had access to a wide range of Chinese cultural experiences and opportunities.  Things that were commonplace in Jinling came to feel like luxuries in Indiana.  For example, I went through withdrawal from real Chinese food.   

Soon after coming back to the US, I went to a typical Chinese buffet and realized that what they were serving was very different from any food in China.  While some of the dishes were similar, all of the ingredients were American substitutions for the real Chinese items.  So began my search for a West-Central Indiana source of authentic Chinese food.  It took a few days, but I did find some restaurants serving things like I remembered from Jinling, and so I was able to soften the blow of my reverse culture shock a little. 

When I came back to West Lafayette, I realized that it didn’t look the same to me as it had before going abroad.  I had become so used to living in China that it took time to get used to not being there any more.  I actually felt that I needed to relearn how to go about everyday life at Purdue in my first few weeks back on the campus.  But while I was making this adjustment, I never felt that I was forgetting my study abroad experience or that it was losing its grandeur; it was just that I was going through a process of making my surroundings feel like “home”, as I had done in Jinling.   

While the “reculturalization” process was challenging, it was also kind of fun, almost like having a second chance to experience all the discoveries that I made about college life in my freshman year. 

A study abroad experience is an amazing thing for a college student.  As I prepare to graduate and begin my career, I realize that my college years – without the challenges of a job and a family life – have offered me a lot of freedom.  It may never again be so easy to spend five months in another country.   

Live Abroad, Work Abroad, Study Abroad!

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