Shocking Cultures--a review

Only a few pages into this slight book, I was already seeing it as a screenplay of Hollywood proportions. A surefire box office hit. With the perspective gained by his own experiences of coming to the USA from Cameroon as a school teacher of French, Dr. Ngomsi details the experiences of newcomers from abroad, his own and others’. While the book lays bare what the newcomer has to learn do and set aside to succeed and survive in a new environment, it also exposes, with the US as an example, the disastrous nature of the unconscious assumptions of the countries to which he or she may come.   

At the outset Shocking Cultures is intensely humorous as the newcomer goes from gaffe to gaffe in the hope of eventually making sense out of the environmentand the people in it. It is not just a matter of laughing at the ignorance of the newcomer, but in fact it is the obliviousness of the USians to their own cultural assumptions that creates the loudest laughs and in subsequent stories the most tearstained disasters.

The book opens with a scenario in which, accidentally “flipping the bird” while counting words on his fingers in a third grade class, the eager teacher is trapped somewhere between prudery and political correctness, and becomes the butt of both snide and explicit ridicule as well as accusations of criminal impropriety.

Cultural studies have long been strapped with distinguishing “high” context cultures from “low” context ones. This is a Western academic bias. Rather, what is required is knowledge of the contexts of various cultures.  Ngomsi’s tales make it eminently clear that US contextual assumptions and language can be as mysterious to the newcomer as are lore of a secret society. The context is too high and takes the newcomer too long to climb. One can often not find foothold on the cultural escarpment even with lively curiosity and earnest questions.

The danger of a serious fall is magnified by unfamiliarity with the language if one is speaking the local tongue as a second language speaker. When an US American says, “Tell me about it!” it is not a request for information but an emphatic statement that one already knows from experience what the other person is saying.  Calling someone “smart” is not always complimentary. Shocking Cultures is laden with these puzzling words and phrases that create painful moments for the newcomer. As the Hindi proverb would have it, “Fell from the sky, landed in a tree”—things go from bad to worse—the newcomer digs a deeper hole trying to climb out of a first mistake.

US addiction to law and order and a follow the rules mentality can be frustrating for USians and visitors alike. They provide the most painful stories in this collection. Let me be very blunt. I suspect that a number of US readers of this book will have a chuckle and dismiss the author’s dilemmas as did his colleagues in the story, “What can you expect of a ‘nappy-headed’ African?” To sober this racist reaction, I can simply cite the case of an intensely familial and culturally sophisticated French mother (now a CEO in an important company). She was detained and interrogated by police in a small Midwestern US town and threatened with losing custody of her children. Her crime? Leaving them in the car for five minutes while she went into the drugstore to get change for the parking meter. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, one more time, “It’s your culture, stupid!”

The book is eminently readable. Ngomsi nicely provides a list the topics issues dealt with in the stories of each chapter on its first page. I found these valuable to review after reading the chapter as they sharpened up the learnings that the engaging stories brought home. It is also intensely personal and one is left with the eternal human dilemma of the expatriate and the immigrant, the struggle between following one’s heart and finding one’s way in the dark woods of another culture.

Shocking Cultures is a strong argument for intercultural training not only for expatriates but for those who welcome them.  It also argues for very explicit and clear introduction to those parts of a culture that are highly contextual as well as those people would rather not speak about. I would recommend it as a must-read for people who do expatriation training as well as using it as a give-away to arriving expats and their hosts.