There's no place like home - or at least that's what many expats in China believe. But upon returning to their native soil, repatriates often find home just isn't the same place they left, and they're not the same people who once lived there. "Reverse culture shock", or "re-entry transition stress", is often more severe and emotionally intense than culture shock, explains Dr Christopher Deal, president of Los Angeles, California-based consulting firm Deal Intercultural.
Some scholars liken repatriation to space flight. A shuttle encounters less resistance leaving Earth's atmosphere than during re-entry. "The most difficult aspect of repatriation is that most people do not expect it to be difficult," Deal says, adding that expats often "romanticize" their homelands from abroad. "Many expatriates feel they are simply going home, with the idea in mind that everything will be great when they return to their passport countries."
However, upon repatriation, "they discover that things back home are not actually as wonderful as they expect them to be".
According to the Global Relocation Trends Survey Report, jointly published by Windham International and the National Foreign Trade Council in the United States, 25 percent of repatriates leave their companies within two years, while 40 percent believed companies failed to make good use of "expatriates' valuable insights and skills" upon repatriation.
The report, which surveyed nearly 75,000 expatriates from 264 companies, also found that, "too often, a company doesn't know where to slot the employee with international experience. After wandering around looking for either an office or a job, the repatriated employee walks out the door into the arms of the competition".
Dr Nan Sussman, president of international HR and cultural-training company Global Strategies, says the unexpectedness of experiencing difficulties often leads people to "misinterpret problems they encounter when they do return home" and unconsciously project re-entry anxieties on other things, such as jobs, marriages and cities of residence.
This is often magnified by the fact that, "people in their home country expect repatriates to be able to return quickly and easily to their former lives, which is actually quite difficult", Deal explains.
Australian Geraldine Atkinson, who spent four and a half years teaching English in China before returning home, says her re-entry stress was "not so severe". But she still found, "there is considerable pressure from people around you to get back in and resume the life you had before leaving".
And while maintaining regular contact with home ensured that, "in some ways, things hadn't really changed at all", she found "some relationships were different".
"When you decide to live in another country, some of those people left behind feel they have been abandoned in some way," she says. "While I kept in close contact with family and friends, I was not there to experience day-to-day life with them, and that, in itself, can over time create distances."
Deal explains that much of the literature refers to repatriation as a "grieving process" because of the psychological shift expatriation causes.
"Their old self, in a sense, dies, and a new self is born. This can be very stressful, and usually results in grief over this 'death'," he says.
And those left behind often grieve the expatriate, too. "When the person returns, it's as if a ghost has reappeared", and this "ghost" is different from the person who left, Deal says. "Recognizing re-entry as a grieving process allows repatriates to deal with it more effectively."
For Australian Will Burgess, who worked as Reuters' chief photographer in China from 1994 to 1998, the repatriation challenge was less about reconnecting with family than bringing a new family member back with him. While he took to repatriation "like a duck to water", he says his Chinese wife, whom he'd met during his second year in Beijing, "was, at times, very sad she'd moved so far away from where she was born". But after a visit from her sister and enrolling in English-language classes funded by the Australian government, she became glad for the move.
Dutch psychologist Dr Kirsten Hogh Thogersen, who has treated expats in international clinics in Beijing and Brussels for 20 years, says that few repats realize that, "going out as an expatriate is a one-way ticket". So, they often face difficulties coming to terms with their new identities in their old environments.
"I could never be the same as before," says American Pat Regan, who came to Beijing on a fellowship from the University of Michigan to research the Chinese art scene from 2005 to 2006. For him, one of the most difficult parts of repatriation was paying more attention to Western social norms. "In China, you can be whoever you want to be, because you don't fit in," he says. "When you walk down the street, it's obvious you're a foreigner. There's no requirement to fit any social expectations, and there's a freedom to that, which I missed when I came back."
Having lived in Japan for a year and in Hong Kong for six months, Sussman says new behaviors can magnify re-entry stress. "I valiantly tried to have all visitors to my New York home remove their shoes upon entering - friends, repairmen, etcetera," she says. "As you can imagine, I was met with great resistance all the time. I finally gave up."
Nancy Jervis, vice-president of the New York-based China Institute, says that she also developed a Chinese layer to her personality after working in China from 1979 to 1982 as a polisher and instructor. "People develop different styles of relating to people depending on the culture they're living in," she says.
Australian Kurt Mansell, 26, who studied and worked as a consultant in China from 1999 to 2003, says he found this particularly troublesome. "I somehow felt my behaviors and attitudes were at right angles to those around me," he says. "I would respond in a Chinese way to people, which made me somewhat feel like a foreigner to the people close to me."
Resettlement periods vary from person to person, but most repatriates could expect it to take between a year and 18 months, Deal says, while some never completely readjust.
"After being back in the US for a while, you assert your American personality again; I'm like a bull in a china shop again," Jervis says.
She believes heeding the lessons learned from her earlier, unsuccessful repatriation from France made her repatriation from China successful. "When I came back from France, I didn't know what to do, because I had unplugged myself. I got very depressed," Jervis says. "I knew before I came back from China that I needed to make a plan."
Formulating a plan before returning home can be crucial to reducing re-entry stress. Mansell found "starting again from scratch" was the toughest part of his repatriation. "It seemed twice as hard to settle back in Australia, because I felt like my own country, as well as my family, had changed and evolved without me, and I was left behind," he says.
It's important to realize that the difficulties of repatriation stem from personal growth, Deal explains. "The benefits of living abroad are profound and powerful," he says. "Just as culture shock is correctly described as a learning process, repatriation and the reverse culture shock that occurs is also a learning process, and is useful and necessary."
(China Daily September 7, 2007)
