Chapter 12 comparison

These two articles tell us two completely different cases. First, I will talk about similarities. Dita and Masika are all from different countries and come to the Unite State to pursue their college education. They are both international students. They both feel culture shock. They feel confusion for the American culture. Many things are different such as food, weather and people. Americans seems hard to close. They are always anxious to go home immediately. It is hard to talk with classmates. Dita and Masika both face a problem of the communication. They both need to deal with the problems. However, the ways which they use are total different.

Dita is a shy girl. When she comes to the Unite State, she hates the food and weather. When the problems come, she tries to solve the problems. None of food was delicious. She also do not eat hamburgers or chicken sandwiches, so she fails. When she has problems with communication, she does not deal with the problems well either. She does not get the professor’s mind and misunderstands. When she faces the culture shock like the sexual problem, she let the relationship between roommate Sandra and her become cold. Sandra is unsympathetic to her. Then she feels depress and lonely. Because of these happening she fails at last and she even thinks that coming to North America had been a really bad decision. On the other hand, Masika is totally different. Although she meets the same problems such as culture shock, leaming and comfort zone. She also feels confusion with them, but she analyzes the problems and herself. She lists pertinent questions and gives responses. When she feels great pressure and wants to cry, she does not give up and was not let the tears down. She finds that it is hard to close to classmate because they always go home hurriedly. Then she gets the reasons from her classmates, and she also thinks the relationship is important. At last, she finds the key thing she gets is that cultural adjustment is a process, not an end. Her marriage is an interracial marriage. Her husband is white and she is black. They need to adjust each other as well. I think that the adjustment is harder than that between different countries. The reasons for success are different attitudes. Masika insists on adjusting and keeps finding out problems. Dita is tender and easy to give up.

Masika is a good example for us, international students. The problems we met were similar to Masika’s. We need to analyze each problem and find way to deal with. The process is really important. Maybe sometime the end is not expected, but you also can get a lot of useful things from the process. We should pay attention on the process. Not only for the adjustment, but also for every thing.