105 Learning Journal #5

[Melody (Mengdong) Zhuang]

When I first arrived in the US, I knew and I expected there were a lot of culture differences between China and the U.S. Therefore I remained open-minded to observe what I had to experience. The biggest struggle for me was that I had to contribute my thoughts and opinions from the readings and say something meaningful in class discussion. I wasn’t comfortable firstly to express my thoughts in front of a class, secondly to have to raise hand and come up with some ideas fast enough so that my classmates would not have said the similar thing already. I was grateful to experience culture shock in which it made me become a more open-minded person. Korea, however, is a neighboring country to China, thus there are fewer culture shocks I could imagine to experience comparing to that of America. One thing I do shocked when I first saw a Korean minor did a half-bow to an elder to express an respected good-bye.