A 13th century Venetian merchant and explorer, Marco Polo, spent twenty-four years of his life traveling in Asia, seventeen of which he spent in China. He was the first person to provide the West with a reasonably accurate picture of Eastern Asia’s geography and of the customs of people who lived there. The records of Marco Polo’s travels, which were written based on his stories, do not give us any psychological or philosophical insights into his life. Nevertheless, we can be sure that Marco Polo came back from his travels as a completely different person. Experience is what shapes us individually and makes each of us unique. Certainly, experience can be gained through numerous means, such as working in various industries, meeting new people, reading tons of books, attending various events, etc., but living in other countries and interacting with representatives of other cultures is the most dramatic and effective way to gain advantageous experience, changing and broadening your view on life and on the world forever.

When you live in the country where you were born and belong to one culture, you are surrounded by people who are relatively similar to you, whose values, opinions, tastes are familiar to you. While people of one culture are not all the same, they do share a similar cultural identity which is expressed through their vision of life, behavior, and expectations of others. If you move to another country, you will, at least at first, expect people to behave in a similar way to inhabitants of your own country or region and therefore in a similar way to yourself. You will be quite surprised, annoyed, or even shocked when your expectations are fundamentally not satisfied, when representatives of another culture do not confine themselves to the norms of behavior present in your own culture, and often even conduct themselves in completely opposite ways. When you encounter this puzzling phenomenon, your first reaction will be to condemn and fight it by all means. You will likely fall victim to the erroneous belief that if you just explain to these people their wrongs and their defiance of social expectations, they will understand and adopt your vision of life.

Being entirely engulfed by members of another culture that you do not understand or accept on an everyday basis will make you feel lonely and isolated. To avoid this innately human, painful feeling, you will be forced to reconsider and reinvestigate this newfound, enigmatic culture, and then start questioning the validity of your own values. You will want to fit in and be accepted by these foreign people. At this stage, you will falsely believe that you can completely change yourself, and try to pretend that you have been reborn into this culture, indistinguishable from a native. However, no matter how long and how fully you immerse yourself in a different culture, the culture in which you were born will always haunt you, for better or for worse. No matter what motivated you to move to another country in the first place, you will become an amalgam of two cultures. You will find yourself no longer capable of happily going back and reintegrating into the culture to which you were born because you will always be aware of different approaches to life. You will also be someone who will forever bring intriguing and unique experiences to the table.

Choosing to live in a different country is a difficult and disruptive path, one without chance of return. It is a path of tremendous sacrifice, and yet one of near limitless gain, for your own sake and for the sake of others. Your internal struggle and variety of unsettled questions will make you valuable person because you will question everything, you will have a broader vision, you will promise innovation, because you will never belong to any culture and therefore will never be defined and constrained by one. You will be wonderfully suspended between the heavens and the earth for as long as you are alive.

Olga Sylvia, PhD