20 MaryAnn St., Ultimo
Sydney, Australia
11 February 2005
Last Thursday, early in the morning on 3 Feb., Chad and I crossed the boundary they call "customs and immigration" here into Australia. The quarantine officers did not balk at the four bagels Chad carried, nor at the half-full box of WhoppersTM candy in my backpack. The immigration official accepted our 12-month "temporary resident" visas without comment. All our luggage arrived safely and on time. So, our ten months living and working in Australia began with a reasonably successful crossing of that first important boundary.
I've been thinking a lot about boundaries since then, as we've busied ourselves "settling in" for a long-term stay in a foreign country. The concept of "boundary" is related to that of "border," but it isn't quite the same. In group facilitation and outdoor adventure, we talk about personal boundaries, about respecting them but also challenging yourself to expand them. If a border is permeable but relatively stable in space, a boundary is both less permeable and more flexible in space. Borders have to do with identity-- which is why "border studies" has crept up in cultural studies to enquire about and explore the identities and identifications of people who live near, or on both sides of, established borders. Boundaries, on the other hand, have more to do with comfort. I can only assume that my entry into Australia did not, in and of itself, threaten the Australian identity, though it did (and should have) raised questions about whether they as a country were comfortable with my presence there and the presence of anything I was carrying with me.
Of course, a sense of "being comfortable with" and a sense of identity are always related in subtle and complex ways, so boundaries and borders are not always easy to sort out. I have been keenly aware of the relationships between identity and comfort as we have continued to cross boundaries which I had only vaguely noticed. Two and a half years ago, I crossed the border into Australia for the first time, but now, on my third crossing of this border, I am for the first time crossing the boundary between visiting Australia and living in it. Living here means taking more time, doing more legwork, sorting out more beauracracy, and, so far, seeing fewer sights. It means learning the lingo and the local traditions not just out of curiousity, but because you have to in order to survive. Visiting the grocery store and staying in a place without an oven was fun last year when I was only visiting-- but when yesterday I really wanted to make a meatloaf, some of the "hey, I'm in a foreign country" charm wore off quickly.
Culture shock, I think, is an experience of personal boundaries being stretched as a result of crossing borders. Chad has described the culture shock of his first few weeks living in Taiwan in 1999. Without the language barrier here in Australia (or in Britain, for that matter), my travels so far have never caused quite the same experience of "culture shock." But this week, crossing over from visiting to living here, I have definitely had many moments of wanting to crawl under the covers and stay there. While the things that tourists do here in Oz are not that unfamiliar, the things that residents do are quite strange to me. Different attitudes toward internet, towards food, different household practices, different ways of doing business. Some of the differences are kind of neat-- here in Sydney they tend to preserve the facades and shells of old buildings and build new ones inside them. Some of these cultural differences are just frustrating-- the cell phone companies work on a profoundly different (and to us, nonsensical or outrageous) paradigm. Some are a little of both-- every single cafe in Sydney serves elaborate breakfasts ("brekkie") until late afternoon, but few of them stay open past 4pm and their selection of coffee drinks is limited. The energy that we are expending to recognize, accept, and accomodate these differences between what is here and what we are used to is, frankly, draining. Those bed-covers call to me, for hiding under them lets me pretend that everything outside is not as uncomfortable as it seems.
And it isn't, I know. These first weeks I may retreat into those "comforts of home" that I can find every once in a while, but gradually, "everything outside" is becoming not as uncomfortable as it seems. That's what happens, I know, when I cross my personal boundaries with gentleness and respect-- they expand outward to include things they didn't include before. And that kind of "growing comfortable with" is why I travel in the first place.