Culture Shock a Western Student Might Experience in Cambodia

In many different parts of the world, there happens to be multitudes of various cultures, including varieties of customs as well as beliefs. All races of humankind on the planet indeed grow up with their own values and beliefs, the ways they express themselves, the things they talk about, which differ somewhat, or even totally, from other people in other countries. Therefore, when a person travels abroad, leaving a familiar culture to live in a new and different culture, he is bound to face with a lot of changes which can be exciting and stimulating, but it can contrastingly be overwhelming, making that person feels sad, anxious, frustrated, and lonely or sometimes want to go home. These conditions can be defined as “culture shock”.
Similarly, if a student from a Western country comes to study at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, he/she is guaranteed to experience some amounts of culture shock, since the Khmer and Western customs are not the same. Thus, what kind of Khmer customs might make him/her experience culture shock? And why?

First and foremost, all students at RUPP are obliged to wear uniform. In Cambodia, it is customarily believed that formality is of great importance indeed for showing respect and it is regarded as all Khmer people’s value. For example, men are expected to wear long-sleeve blue or white shirts, long black pants, and boots in school as well as at workplace. On the other hand, women should avoid skirts above the knees and sleeveless low-cut blouses in public. In school, any student who does not conform to the dress code will be covertly told off or even sometimes expelled from school. Moreover, since the purpose of dressing is to blend in with others, not to stand out, the western student must abide by the dress code in order not to appear conspicuous in crowd, especially in the classroom. In the West, it is not uncommon that students wear plain clothes most of the time when they go to most universities, so uniform will come as a challenging shock and adjustment to the western student; he/she may feel frustrated at the obligation of wearing uniform, because they cannot choose to wear anything they like, such as fashion clothes, sexy short skirts, etc.
Secondly, another Khmer custom still mostly common among Khmer people is the greeting to each other in the form of “Sampeah”. Sampeah is the greeting gesture of putting palms together into the shape of a “lotus bud”; then you raise the bud as high as the nose and bow to the other person, saying “Chumreap Suor”. Nowadays, although, influenced by Western culture, Cambodian men shake one another’s hands, the Sampeah must still be preferred by women, and especially when the student greet the teacher, young people greet the elder, lower status people greet higher status people, etc. In the Western countries, people of equal status greet each other by shaking hands or hugging, which is regarded as inappropriate if done by people of unequal social status in Cambodian society. For example, a young child cannot shake hands with his elders, the student with the teacher. Thus, a Western student who has never been taught how to do this before might probably find it a little difficult to adapt and take both time and getting used to to do it correctly in the first place, since the essence of this custom is to show respect and politeness towards teachers, and if we can do that properly, we are valued beyond measure.
Thirdly, besides the customary greeting of Sampeah and the formality of wearing uniform, submission to the teacher is also one of the still-in-practice customs in Khmer culture. In classrooms, any challenges or disagreements are not common behavior for any student. For example, a student may be allowed to ask teachers questions, but he/she cannot contradict that the answers are wrong in any case. There should be harmony in the communication; that is, sometimes people just choose to keep quiet with the view that they had better maintain harmonious relationships. Every behavior is associated with a reason of safety. Cambodians do not dare to do anything that possibly leads them to feel unsafe. This does not mean they do not have anything to express or to do in a certain way, but as they are afraid of taking risks, they prefer to keep it inside their heart. On the other hand, for most western students’ characters this kind of harmony may make foreign students feel restricted, repressed and even subordinated due to the fact that western cultures are full of debates and freedom of speech. What is more, a western student may also be prone to think that Cambodian society is not really fair for the time-being.
Last but by no means least, Cambodian custom does not allow adult boys and girls to have intimate or close relationships with each other. This means that boys and girls, however, cannot be close friends. This statement can be inferred from the fact that Khmer custom gives the responsibility of arranging marriage to the parent, not the children. Parents are mediators for their children; they look for a suitable girl and propose to their son to marry her. At RUPP, as in other places in the open, the relationship between the two sexes is restricted to just speech. Any physical contacts, such as kissing, groping, to show affection in public is regarded as inappropriate, and the girl will be regarded as disreputable. Another thing is that showing affection in public will embarrass other people around, as Asian fabric is completely opposed to that feat. As a consequence, a Western student, particularly a boy, who comes to study in Cambodia, must learn to adapt to this culture while he might also find this custom somehow shocking, since he has formerly lived in a society that is much more individualistic, and marriage is not really the responsibility of the parent, yet it is the children’s decisions. That can be explained that people growing up in the west act on their own free will without caring about what other people think of him/her. Therefore, in the western society it is not uncommon to see adult boys and girls being in intimate terms before marriage.
All in all, if a Westerner comes to study in Cambodia, he/ she is at least expected to experience some culture shock due to a number of Khmer customs, namely the formality of the dress code, the customary greeting “Sampeah”, submission to the teacher, and the relationships between boys and girls. But it should also be noted that there is not so much of Cambodian custom to surprise a Westerner today, because, in case we have not noticed, Westerners are learners. They have already done a plenty of reading about Khmer culture before they visit Cambodia. Thus, they are prepared for the changes. It can also be legendarily put that Cambodian customs are positively strict and consist of a plethora of how-tos. This is definitely true as there are, in fact, more how-tos than there have been in the depictions above, such as how to speak, to walk, to stand, to sit and even how to sleep. However, it is obviously going without saying that every culture trains its children to become good members of the society in order to insure harmony, peace and stability, and similarly Khmer parents teach their children to be well-mannered, to morally correctly behave in the society.