Yesterday I met up with another student who also has roots in another country besides the United States. Ren is from Lima, Peru but has also spent a part of his life in Paraguay before residing in the United States. He is a 4th year student at ESU and he studies Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and in the future plans to attend medical school somewhere in America. I sat down with Ren to ask him about his experiences after arriving in the "land of the brave, home of the free".
I asked first of all how Ren decided to come to the States in the first place. He explained that as he went to high school in Paraguay and Paraguay had a partnership with Kansas, he could transfer to Kansas and attend college here.
I also wanted to know how he had experienced American people and he told me that he was surprised by the fact that the stereotypical expectations concerning American people were not met. He explained that the people in South America see people living up north as cold, not very family oriented and somewhat frivolous. To his astonishment people were very friendly and strongly family oriented, much like South Americans are. He thinks that in smaller towns you can notice even more clearly how family oriented people are and he also mentioned that people in Emporia are extremely nice.
"One thing that struck me here from the people was their need for personal space, their "bubble" as they call it," Ren says. Him giving kisses to his friends´ cheeks was not always understood as a common South American way of saying 'hello'. To him there is a big difference in how people behave here and what they are like in his home country. One thing that I have also mentioned before in my previous entry is the small talk-culture and I asked how Ren feels about it. He said that what to him was a problem was the fact that people pass you by and ask how you are doing but still barely even stop. "You can tell that they don´t really care," he says. It bothered him to the point where he just stopped answering people while walking past them.
I wanted to know if he had encountered any shocking things after coming here and he told me an anecdote about a situation where he had opened the door at the university to an American girl he knew, and the girl had refused to go in because she said that she is American, independent and doesn´t need him to open doors for her. To Ren this was a matter of being polite because that is how he was raised, and not about taking away her independence. This just proves that even a small thing like opening a door to another person can hold a strong symbolic charge.
And how would he describe the American culture in general? He wouldn´t. His opinion is that to some degree there is an American culture but still you can´t generalize it down to something specific because there is such a great variety of different cultural influences inside it and the culture is very regionwise. Ren´s intention is to live in America for the rest of his life even though there always is something to make better. What would Ren make better if he could? He feels that there is a lot of cultural ignorance; different kind of ignorance than that of South America where there is a lot of people, a lot of poverty and thus not all get to go to high school. Here people, even though highly educated in many cases, don´t have a lot of interest towards matters outside their country, all brown skinned citizens are considered as Mexicans and he also thinks people aren´t very acceptant towards homosexuals, different kind of lifestyles or religions.
In many ways I share Ren´s observations and opinions even though we come from different parts of the world to experience America. Let´s hope that changes towards being more tolerant will happen all over the world.
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