Semester Exchanges— A Flimsy Narrative

Are short-time cultural  exchange interactions too banal?

By Harram Khan

You're a semester exchange student and at an American university for a few months. Because it is a cultural exchange, the dictated purposes of your visit are not purely academic—rather your exchange sponsor would call it “interculturally interactive” while you resist conjuring up the image of yourself in class wearing a saari. You don't know how health insurances work or what “cinnamon toast crunch” is, and every person you come across ensures vehemently that the weather is bound to get much worse. That is the preface to an average conversation you will have in the next four months.

You tell the “local” about your exchange semester status (or are led to tell as such by the natural stream of dialogue people tend to follow), and instantly, a frenzy ensues where the local must be categorically self-critical of the foreign policies of a certain president. Suddenly, you must be an entire country's spokesperson or an exhibitionist at the least; anything short of that role is a defamation to your South East Asian heritage. The well being of that farmer in Punjab's remotest, romanticized village depends on your indifferent shoulders.

Speaking of exchanges, I have felt that the room for personal discovery has been greatly limited by the nature of instructions sponsored exchange students receive from different institutions. Instructions that teach about how to behave in conformity with American culture not only leads to ingenuine connections, but it does nothing to further the cause of organic cultural exchange. For instance if exchange organizations and sponsors emphasise too much on the “American” way of shaking hands, the sponsored students only get uneasy about their own conduct. They feel that they cannot be more honest about general things, and have to be agents, instead of real people existing in real, rich and very different cultures. Cultures that have multiple folds of complexities, and are not simply “better” or “worse”.

Identifying the place I’m from, and feeling connected to its history and aesthetics, I have always seen myself in its light. Having said that, I wanted this semester to be an opportunity to go down that Walt Whitman flavored path of “self-discovery” by trying different masks, questioning my deep-seated identities and sailing the Great Lakes with a ukulele for company (not the third part). However, since being here, I have found myself deeper in the trench of those inborn and ingrained identities and labels.