Homesickness comes in many forms, including late-night calls with parents, a bowl of hot porridge after a 40 hour flight, and watching your family celebrate a traditional holiday through Facetime. And if being away from family on the other side of the world is not bad enough for international students, the pandemic has made the distance from home much harder this year. Since March 2020, many international students have faced complications when traveling back home. Some have stayed in the United States since the pandemic started without returning home in almost a year. This sudden change made homesickness more relevant than ever for many international students.
Steven Yang ‘23 stayed in Massachusetts last summer, 6725 miles away from Beijing, China, which Yang calls home. He lived with a host family by himself for the entire summer due to the inconveniences involved in traveling to China. “I felt lonely and disconnected from family and friends back home,” Yang says, thinking back to his experience.
Linh Nguyen ‘22 finds herself facing the same dilemma when it comes to travelling back home for breaks this school year, as she will not be able to go to Vietnam for Thanksgiving or Christmas due to the policies back home. Many international students face similar issues like complicated quarantines, long travels, expensive and limited plane tickets, finding places to stay in America, and of course, missing friends and family.
However, Yang says that his homesickness has slowly gone away as the school year started. “Friends here make the experience so much better for me. They fill out that lonely gap I had a few months ago.” Similarly, Day Kim ‘23 says that finding friends who are also missing home and family helps her embrace these feelings and they support each other.
After all, homesickness isn’t purely about missing where we are from or the food, culture, and people back home. It is also a sense of belonging and attachment: craving love, security, and company.
According to the psychological definition, homesickness is an adjustment disorder. In a new school, city, and country, it is more than usual to face adjustment issues. However, students in Mercersburg have proved that in our school community, we can find this missing love, company, and security as well.
For Thanksgiving, several international students who can’t go home for the break have decided to travel together. Many are going to New York, Boston, or DC to spend their holiday with one another. Other international students choose to stay at their American friends’ homes to celebrate American holidays with their friends’ families.
Without a doubt, missing home and family can be an overwhelming hardship; but in another respect, being away from home also binds Mercersburg students together.
Greeting and Formality in Mercersburg
The 2021-2022 academic year is off to a good start as the school brings back many traditions that had to stop temporarily due to the pandemic. As COVID restrictions ease, there are more opportunities for students to experience the real Mercersburg community to which almost half of the student body is new. The key element that serves as the foundation of this community is diversity. In the following interviews, I asked two Korean students, two non-Korean students, and one staff member about some of the cultural differences between Mercersburg and South Korea.
Questions for Korean students:
Mercersburg News: What is your favourite way to greet someone?
Taeeon Moon ‘25 (TM): My favourite way to greet people is to offer them food.
Albert Park ‘25 (AP): Dabbing and asking about their day.
MN: What surprised you the most about Mercersburg when you first started living here?
TM: First of all, people were so nice and interested in diverse cultures. And that the school
had a nice and large campus.
AP: The friendliness of dorm parents and fellow prefects.
Do you think Mercersburg has a very formal culture or is it more relaxed?
TM: Because the COVID protocols are steadily subsiding, it seems like this year has become especially relaxing for students.
AP: I think Mercersburg culture is a more relaxed culture because students do not depend on the pressures they get from grades.
Do you feel that Mercersburg is more formal than South Korea?
TM: I would say that the formality of a culture heavily depends on the language of the culture. If there is a formality in language with a distinct way to treat the old and young like in South Korea, it overall makes the culture more formal. The Mercersburg culture, on the other hand, encompasses all students and faculties that allow them to feel comfortable.
AP: No, because part of the culture of South Korea aligns with Confucianism. This makes the manners in Korea more formal than the Mercersburg culture.
What is your favorite part of Mercersburg culture?
TM: I love the interactions between students from different ethnicities. Unlike my old school in South Korea, students no matter their grades or ages interact freely with each other, which makes the Mercersburg culture a cohesive one.
AP: I like that the Mercersburg culture welcomes many different traditions that help students to easily blend into the community.
Questions for non-Korean international students:
What is your favorite way to greet someone?
Alfred Ma ‘25, China (AM): By simply asking how their day has been, as everyone else would do.
Bill Nguyen ‘24, Vietnam (BN): Basically starting in a casual way to ask how they are doing in the day.
Do you think Mercersburg has a very formal culture or is it more relaxed?
AM: I think it is both; it very much depends on the situation. An example would be that family-style dinners are very formal, while hanging out in the student center is more relaxing.
BN: I think there is a good balance in formality and casualty, both of which I enjoy being part.
What do you know about South Korean culture?
AM: I know that South Korea has a very famous K-pop culture.
BN: I know a lot of South Korean food because their holidays are very similar to those in Vietnam and China. I enjoy the food that is so vital to Korean culture.
What is your favorite part of Mercersburg culture?
AM: My favorite part of Mercersburg culture is the people here. The people are very nice and respectful which makes me feel like I’m recognized as being part of the community.
BN: I appreciate how open everyone is. Everyone creates a mood of relaxation and respect that makes this community so special.
Questions for a staff member
How do you think Mercersburg’s culture compares to South Korea’s?
Erin Caretti (EC): Well, I have not lived in Korea since 1998. What I remember is that my students as well as the people in general were very communal. I remember hiking with a group of college students, and one had a candy bar and cut it into 6 pieces, one for each. It is a very shared culture. But also very hierarchical, with those with more experience, older or with better jobs having much more status than others, which seems counter to the first point until you realize the context and everyone has a role to play and knows their role to best protect their communal values, where merit matters.
I think the Mercersburg question is a bit more difficult to answer as I am much more included in this culture, whereas I was more of an “outsider” in Korea as I stood out as a clear minority. There is a hierarchical system here, but not as strict or possibly intimidating. However, the culture here is not as intuitive to the overall sharing.
We reflect the wider US culture where one is able to be fiercely independent and reap what they sow, but at the same time sometimes expected to take care of the wider community, which can cause conflict. We are working with many teenagers from diverse backgrounds, which is very important in understanding and defining culture and reflects the wider and diverse US population. If you want to include food in the “culture” comparison it is much better in Korea than it is here. (Sorry Meriwether Godsey!)
What is your favorite way to greet someone?
EC: In English – “Hello” or “Hey kids!”
In Korean, it depends on the age of who I am greeting, as I try to be respectful to the culture. If they are older than me then I use “annyeong hashimnikka,” same age, then “annyeong haseyo,” if younger, then just “annyeong.” So I tease the Korean students as being disrespectful if they just don’t say “annyeong hashimnikka” to me. But as I understand, the greetings today in Korea are becoming more informal.
Title: Halloween in Japan and United States
Have you ever wondered how Halloween is celebrated outside of the U.S? In Japan, for example, Halloween is not recognized to the extent that it is in the United States. Still, people dress up as witches, Jack O’ Lanterns, or other Halloween-related costumes. In some big cities like Shinjuku, the metropolitan area of Tokyo, young people organize huge Halloween events. However, in most cases, children often go to other people’s houses and get candies, just as they do in many parts of the states.
But this is where the difference comes in. In Japan, there is little to no decoration around the house, and some families may not want some children knocking on their doors and saying “Trick or Treat!” When I experienced Halloween in Japan, I only went to houses that had Halloween stickers on their doors, indicating that they give out candies to trick-or-treaters.
For this reason, when I came to the United States, I was very surprised to see so many Halloween goods in PartyCity. There are a lot of costumes to choose from: creative ones, such as hotdogs 🙂 to scary ones, a mask with a fake knife embedded in the skull.
Additionally, people decorate their houses a lot. While carved pumpkins are long-standing traditional decor, some households embellish their yards with gravestones, spiderwebs, colored lights or skeletons around the door. Lately, inflatable ghost characters have been making an appearance by the garden. The most elaborate houses added to the visual effects by playing recordings of spooky sounds.
Back at PartyCity, they were selling a lot of small candies in packages where people seemed to spend a ridiculous amount of money buying all these Halloween-related supplies and celebrating.
Trick-or-treat on campus was a very fun experience for each one of us to get a lot of candies from the faculty at Mercersburg, too! I personally prefer the traditions in the United States to those in Japan, because Americans go all out. Particularly I enjoyed picking my Halloween costume from the various options they had at stores, like PartyCity, and most importantly, I collected a lot of candies from each house I visited!