I keep hearing people talk about things “going back to normal” soon. Spoiler alert: I don’t think we’re going to back to normal. I personally don’t have a normal U.S. life to go back to, because I moved during a pandemic and lived overseas for six years before that, but I don’t think that even those who had a normal life before COVID are going back to that exact normal. This year (and probably the next few years, thanks to the uncertainty of the pandemic) I’ve been walking through re-entry. As I’ve been thinking about what life might look like as the pandemic hopefully winds down and what I’m comfortable doing now that everyone in my household is fully vaccinated and case numbers are steadily decreasing in Michigan, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned about cross-cultural re-entry and what it might show us about post-pandemic re-entry.
I painted this last summer to represent the changes of going from a “blue culture” to a “yellow culture” and the “green” person I am now after living overseas.
There is an illustration floating around the cross-cultural world using colors to picture moving cross-culturally and returning to your culture of origin. Imagine that your culture of origin is represented by the color blue. All of of your products, practices, and perspectives* are blue. But not every culture is the same. There is another culture out there in the world that is represented by the color yellow. All of the yellow culture’s products, practices, and perspectives are yellow. Both are beautiful, vibrant colors. But what happens when a person from the blue culture moves into the yellow culture? The yellow products, practices, and, perspectives start to change the blue culture person, and they become green. The longer and deeper the engagement in the yellow culture, the more of a yellow-green they become. They don’t fully fit into the yellow culture, because they are green. But then if they move back to the blue culture, they aren’t blue anymore, they are still green. They don’t fully fit into blue culture, either. They have been changed by their contact with the yellow culture and are a beautiful shade of green. There’s no going back to being blue.
If we actually turned color when we went back and forth between cultures–especially coming back to the culture of origin, the effects of crossing cultures might be easier to see. After living overseas, I am a green person. Even if I had come back under ideal circumstances and not in a pandemic, I would not have a normal to come back to. I’m different. I’ve spent lots of time reflecting on how I’m different and what I want my life to be like in a new situation (and this work will continue as I at some point get to settle into a more permanent community). I trust that it is going to be good–I’ve learned a lot, even if some of it has been hard. Trying to pretend I am the same person as I was before I went overseas would be pointless and cause harm.
And this is where I think we can learn something from cross-cultural re-entry for making late-stage-pandemic decisions and imagining a post-pandemic world. Living in a pandemic has changed all of us. We have new products (sourdough bread, masks), practices (curbside pickup and walks becoming social occasions), and perspectives (how our decisions affect each other, communal trust or lack of it). Our formerly blue culture has been changed by yellow “pandemic culture”. I think that our culture going forward is going to be green. Pandemic culture has had too deep of an effect and been too big of a trauma (even for those of us who have had relatively smooth experiences). We aren’t going to be blue anymore.
One of the hardest things about cross-cultural re-entry is people expecting me to be blue when I’m actually green. I am pretty happy to be green at this point. To be able to integrate the ways God used living overseas to make me more like Christ. To honor the impact that living in China had on my life. I’m not the same person I used to be, and that is a good thing. Denying or trying to deny the change is painful.
I think the same will be true for post-pandemic culture. Denying the experience–both the trauma and the gifts–and the ways that it is changing all of us will make it harder. Accepting that we are different and reflecting on how we are different is a way for us to grow and be more integrated people, to become more like Christ. We aren’t going “back to normal”, but hopefully at some point we will settle into new norms that will be more Christ-like than our old ones.
* “Product, practice, perspective” came from a presentation by Dr. Pennylyn Dykstra-Pruim based on her book Understanding Us and Them: Interpersonal Cultural Intelligence for Community Building
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