Three Worlds Collide

{Conversation Partner Reflection 2}

Spain, China, and America are very different countries.  Yet, these three cultures came together last year in Colby Hall.

My conversation partner, Aitana, came from Spain and met her roommate for the first time in Colby Hall, who had just arrived from China.  The two of them come from different backgrounds in different parts of the world and found themselves in somewhere new altogether.  What’s more is that both spoke very little English.

I can only imagine how hard it must be to travel to a new country and know that that new place was home for at least the next few years.  Let alone how hard it must have been to live with someone in such a small space and not be able to properly communicate.

The closest I have gotten to her experience is from this summer when I traveled to Malaysia for the first time.  It was my first time in a country that was not considered “first-world” or “developed”, and I was very much out of my element.  I was confronted with a significantly different culture than what I am used to with different people and a different language.  Even the buildings and streets were nowhere near the kind that I know, making me feel even more like a stranger. 

In my travels this summer, I learned that your definition of home is never definite and, in fact, changes quite often.  I typically consider home the place where I grew up and where my family currently resides in our red-bricked house on Ember Glen.  But I also consider TCU a home away from home because I feel a sense of familiarity here.  On vacation, I often referred to our hotel room as “home” because that was where we could go to relax from a day of sightseeing and socializing.

But I was only in Malaysia for three days.  Aitana was away from home for ten months before she was able to return.  I barely made it those three days and Aitana made it over 100 times that.

To find yourself in a foreign place where you are a stranger is what can make the transition into college life simultaneously difficult and exciting.  However, the transition into college is all the more challenging when you also have to adjust to a new culture and lifestyle.

Culture is another one of those elusive terms.  It can be defined as a collective system of experiences or beliefs or values that are the basis for how certain people interact.  It can also be the accumulation of arts and other human intellectual achievements or the characteristics that a particular group identifies with. 

Even if there isn’t a determined definition of culture, everyone has one.  And it is what your world revolves around – your sense of home and culture. 

Three such worlds collided in Aitana’s freshman dorm room: the world from which Aitana came from in Spain with her family in Málaga the world from which her roommate came from in China with her own family and language and beliefs; and the American world that met them at Texas Christian University in Colby Hall.   

In our conversation last week, she told me the story of how one day she walked into her dorm room to find her roommate using her straightener because she had never used one before and wanted to try it out.  While Aitana was fine with her roommate borrowing her straightener as long as it was with permission, her roommate profusely apologized and even shed tears because of how sorry she was for using the straightener without asking.  This was just a small example of their daily interactions (or lack thereof since she tells me her roommate was pretty quiet).  Through the challenges of figuring out how to communicate, Aitana was able to build a friendship with her freshman year roommate.

When worlds collide, we have the opportunity to learn and to grow from what we learn.  I hope to learn more by leaving my home and travelling to new countries and immersing myself in new cultures.