Foreign but not a foreigner?

I’m not sure how I expected to feel in the US, but I was surprised at how foreign I felt. I thought I’d blend in easily with everybody else; after all, I look like at least half of the population there, and I speak English the same as the majority of them. I’ve been a true foreigner in a foreigner before, when I lived for six years in Indonesia, and there I truly did feel foreign. I didn’t look like anybody else, and in fact I was taller than about 99% of the population; I didn’t speak the language at first, and even later when I was quite fluent, I only ever felt that I had a flimsy grasp on it; and I didn’t understand the culture in spite of a certain superficial knowledge of the main taboos. What surprised me in the US was how similar my feelings were to those I had in Indonesia. In spite of blending in in appearance, I felt off balance, never sure exactly how some things worked, frequently unable to understand what people said, and often afraid that I might have unwittingly offended somebody because of some cultural nuance that I’d missed.

One of the first and most frightening areas where I found adjustment very difficult was the switch from driving on the left to driving on the right. Not that I myself did very much driving; a couple of short excursions around the immediate neighbourhood was all I was game for. However, I did do a lot of walking, which necessarily involved crossing roads with traffic on them, and here I had a problem. I could never quite be certain just where a car might appear from, making me paranoid about checking in every possible direction several times, and even then, sometimes having an unnervingly close encounter with a car in the middle of the intersection I was crossing. I felt that the law which allows cars to turn right on a red light made things unnecessarily dangerous for unwary foreigners such as me! Even in Indonesia, where hardly anybody drives by any recognisable road rules, the law says they are supposed to drive on the left, so I felt that I had some grasp on what they should be doing, even if they weren’t. In the US, I just felt disoriented most of the time.

My sense of direction was also thrown off by the change in position of the sun in the sky. In Australia, if you live below the Tropic of Capricorn (which I do), the sun is always slightly to the north of you, whereas in the US, most of which is above the Tropic of Cancer, the sun is always somewhat to the south. Until I spent some time north of the Tropic of Cancer, I took for granted the fact that I have a good sense of direction, and it was very disorienting to find just how much my sense of direction relies for accuracy on the position of the sun. In the US, I had to stop and make complicated mental calculations to work out which direction was which, and that’s a thing I rarely have to do at home.

Money was another thing which disconcerted me. All the notes look the same, although luckily they each have their denomination marked in clear large figures in the corners. And the 25 cent and 5 cent coins (“quarter” and “nickel” as I had to remember to call them) were extraordinarily hard for me to distinguish. Many times I found myself fumbling embarrassingly for the right amount, and quite often I simply tendered a $1 note instead of bothering with trying to count out change and keeping everybody behind me waiting. I don’t remember having the same problem with coins in Indonesia. The notes there were easy, being different colours and sizes, as ours are in Australia, and I think the coins must have had greater size differences as well.

The topic of money brings me to another area of confusion. How chatty was I expected to be with cashiers, toll booth operators, check out clerks and the like? In my own country, I would not be considered rude if I merely held out the money, accepted any change and receipt, and said thanks, but I had the impression that more is expected in the US in the way of some kind of verbal exchange between customer and clerk. Of course, here in Australia some people are chattier than others, and a transaction between, for example, a check out operator and customer in a supermarket could include pleasantries about the weather, working hours, health and more, but none of this is obligatory. I heard my companion greet people in toll booths or behind counters, ask how much she owed, and say “Here you go” as she gave them the money, none of which would be expected here, so when I was alone, being a naturally very untalkative person, I often forgot to say more than “Hi” and “thanks”, and then later wondered if I’d been considered terribly bad mannered.

This chattiness extended to people on the street or fellow customers in shops or waiting in queues. Strangers seemed to have no hesitation in offering directions if we seemed uncertain which way to go, or in offering opinions or comments about events. I was browsing in Good Will one day when a woman near me suddenly held out a small vase towards me and commented on how attractive it was and what a nice gift it would make. Things like this do happen in Australia too, but they seemed to happen more often in the US, and at more unexpected moments.

The readiness of strangers to speak to each other ties in with the difference between the concepts of public and private space in the US and Australia. Something that I really leapt out at me was the fact that almost nobody had a fence around their house, at least in the parts of the US where I spent most of my time. This would be almost unheard of in Australia. We don’t always have a front fence, but we do almost invariably have back and side fences. Our backyards are private, and nobody except family or very close friends goes there uninvited. It seemed to me that I would feel very exposed living in a house without that private area away from the eye of all and sundry. It seems that Americans may have a veneer of openness and friendliness, a public persona of “hail fellow well met”, but in fact they are just as private as anybody else behind the friendly façade. Many, although not all, Australians tend to be more reserved in public, and to want to keep their home life somewhat private behind fences, but once you get past the more reserved façade, they are as friendly as Americans.

In Indonesia, everybody you meet speaks to you and asks quite personal questions as a matter of course, and as a foreigner, you come to accept that this is just how Indonesians are. However, when you’re mixing with people who look more or less the same as you do, there is a certain underlying assumption that they will have the same mores as you, and therefore it’s more of a shock when they don’t. I think it’s easy for an Australian such as me to believe that because Americans are so apparently outgoing, they really do look on you as a friend, and then it comes as a surprise when you come up against the barrier that they have around their more private selves.

Along with the cultural pitfalls, I found that I did not always speak the same language, even though both Americans and Australians speak English. Pronunciation differences and differences in word usages meant that quite often I came up against a complete breakdown in communication. This was most worrying in public places, where I often found announcements over loudspeakers incomprehensible, and worried that I might be missing something I really should know.

Something that I found frustrating was the little “taken for granted” pieces of information which make everyday life smoother if you know them. A couple of times I had to ring an 800 number, which I did by dialling 800 to start, only to hear a recorded announcement that “your call could not be connected as dialled”. I was baffled, and checked and double checked the phone book to make sure I’d got the number right. Eventually my American friend told me that I should have dialled 1-800; it’s taken for granted that everybody knows this, so the “1” isn’t always included in the phone number as it’s printed in the phone book. How was I supposed to know that I needed to dial 1 first?

I was interested to note that my companion did not seem particularly “American” when she was alone with me, but when I saw her with a group of her friends, suddenly she seemed much more like them than I had expected. Like them, she tended to talk fairly loudly and certainly expansively, and the American accent seemed more noticeable. There seemed to be something indefinable that made them seem different to me than a group of Australians would have seemed.

Although I loved the time I spent in the US, in a way deep down I felt a sense of relief to be back in my own country and culture. In spite of the high, harsh sun and the hot weather, here I feel at ease. I don’t have to be on the alert all the time in case I do something wrong and offend somebody inadvertently; when I’m crossing a busy street I can take a risk because I’m reasonably sure that I can anticipate what any oncoming vehicles might be going to do; I can understand most public announcements, and I can pay for things in small change without even thinking about it. I know how to navigate my way through my days and through all my public encounters and necessary transactions without even thinking about it, because I have stored in my subconscious all the necessary pieces of information, even the unwritten and unspoken ones. Oh yes, and here I can tell which direction I’m going by where the sun is in the sky.