Cultures clash as students readjust to college life

Margaret Files Guest Writer

Rachel Hui Guest Writer

Anna Volk ’08 misses empanadas. For Carrie Holland ’08, it’s good sushi. Lily Huang ’08 even misses burritos for breakfast. Until he goes back home next summer, Elom Katako ’10 relies on a wood carving of a tribal flute-player rests to remind him of his home in Ghana. Grace Tan ’09 brought back a 44 lb. box of food from home with her. But Jessica Chong ’08 was looking forward to not having dumplings and goulash every day, even with All-College Dining Center (ACDC) fare as the alternative.

According to the Office of Residential Life, nearly 150 juniors returned to Vassar this January after spending a semester studying abroad. Vassar’s international students have also returned from foreign locales, although for them Vassar is an abroad experience. As these students settle back into their Vassar routines, they look back fondly on the things they miss about their host or home country,and try to re-adjust to firm deadlines, dreary weather, and yes, ACDC.

Volk said that she considers her semester in the metropolis of Santiago an escape from both the Vassar bubble and small-town Poughkeepsie. “I miss Chileans protesting everything. I miss being able to see something on TV, then go be there half an hour later, because everything that happens in Chile happens in Santiago.” Volk said that she joined the crowds celebrating the death of ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet on Dec. 10. “I got tear-gassed three times,” she said casually. “That was fun.”

Huang said she feels similarly about her program on the Mexican-American border, where she crossed daily between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. “It was just so much easier to be politically active,” she reflects. “Like, ‘Oh, so Subcomandante Marcos is going to talk on the bridge, come to that.’ It felt more like this is happening where I’m living, not ‘I’m at Vassar, that’s happening two hours away in New York City.’”

On the other hand, Holland lived just outside Sydney, the biggest city in Australia, but she still felt that she was missing New York City’s energy and influence. “Just its presence—I’ve never felt a presence like New York’s when I was abroad, not even in Bangkok or Sydney.”

Kyle Chea ’10 said that returning home from Vassar to his conservative and largely religious hometown of Nassau, Bahamas, was “like swimming into the ocean and then going back into the pond.”

Most international students interviewed said that while they regard their home country with affection and nostalgia, returning there made them realize that Vassar has now become their real home. “For some of my friends back in Switzerland who are studying abroad, the hold of home is stronger,” said Dorothea Blank ’10. “They idealize it when all they did in high school was complain. Some people aren’t willing to let go. College is, after all, the first time you have to deal with stuff on your own, and high school back home was far safer.”

After a semester in Prague in the Czech Republic, Chong said, “It’s hard when people ask you how abroad was. ‘How was abroad?’ Like, what are you supposed to say?”

“We all have a huge volume of experience that we don’t share with the people we care about here,” says Morgan Warners ’08, who spent five months in Madrid, Spain. “It’s a bit like coming back to a different Vassar than the one we left at the end of last year.”

George Purves, a second-year exchange student from Exeter University, England described his return to Vassar as surreal. “Vassar is like this magical land completely separate from home life,” he said. “It’s not like boarding school in England where my parents would come every now and then to visit…Remembering that you have two homes is very weird. It’s like living two lives.”

Purves said he tries as hard as he can to keep his two lives separate by not bringing any trinkets from home with him to Vassar. “It would make me feel worse,” he said. “I don’t like mixing my two worlds and I never have…except for my jar of marmite, which all my American friends can’t stand. They think it tastes like gasoline.”