Culture Reporter Project- Application of Intercultural Theory

For people like me who study abroad for a while and going to graduate soon, we met the time to make another big decision in our life. This is a new turning corner and the reasons I choose this group to interview and study is that the amount of this group of people is increasing fast and it has becoming a social phenomenon whether they went back home or stay in the country they studied. I interviewed three people studied in UNL and will going to graduate this May. Two of them are undergraduate students and the other is graduate student. It is a difficult choice for every international student to decide whether they should stay or not.

According to Martin & Nakayama (2009), W-curve theory is “a theory of cultural adaptation suggests that sojourners experience another U- curve upon returning home.” (p. 331).  Although these students have not went back home yet, their concerns and ideas about their future reflect this theory quite a lot. All of them told me that they actually experienced the difficulty during the time they visited their family during school breaks and they can even image some difficult situations after graduate because they need to suit their hometown again!

It is harder for people to experience W- curve theory than the U- curve theory because people will not prepare for it that much. Of course, students can image some situations and they have prepared emotionally to face those challenges. But when those problems really come, they find it is not the results they expected to have. For example, one of my interviewees, which is also my friend, did an internship in hometown last summer. He said he will never forget the time he spent in the office and with those co-workers. This is not because the environment and those co-workers are not friendly. The reason is that those people have their own ways to do business and hanging out with friends. The way he treated with people in the United States is not work at all in China. The internship was just lasts for one month and he had to quit because he did not want to continue be an outsider in that office. As Martin and Nakayama said, “the person who returns home is not the same person who left home” (p. 332).

References:

Maritn, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2010). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (Fifth ed., pp. 185-187). New York, NY: Mcgraw-Hill.