To Funny - What it feels like to be Bicultural! The Best Explanation I have Read.

“We can get out and learn to live in the new culture, and, in time, we will feel as at home in it as our own, possibly even more so. Something Happens to us when we adapt to a new culture, we become bicultural people. Our parochialism based on our unquestioned feeling that there is really only one way to live, and our way is it, is shattered. We must deal with cultural variety, with the fact that people build cultures in different ways, and that they believe their cultures are better than ours. Aside from some curiosity at our foreignness, they are not interested in learning our ways.

But to the extent we identify with the people and become bicultural, to that extent we find ourselves alienated from our kinsmen and old friends in our homeland. This is not reverse culture shock, although we will experience that when we return home after a long stay abroad. It is a basic difference in how we now look at things. We have moved from a philosophy that assumes uniformity to one that has had to cope with variety, and our old friends often don’t understand us. In time we may find our closest associates among other bicultural people.

In one sense, bicultural people never fully adjust to one culture, their own or their adopted one. Within themselves they are part of both. When Americans are abroad, they dream of America, and need little rituals that re affirm this part of themselves—a food package form home, a letter, an American visitor from whom they can learn the latest news from `home’. When in America, they dream of their adopted country, and need little rituals that reaffirm this part of themselves—a visitor from that country, a meal with its food. Bicultural people seem happiest when they are flying from one of these countries to the other.

(“Crucial Dimensions in World Evangelization”, Paul Hiebert, 1976, 4^th printing, William Carey Library, Pasadenia California pg 51,52)