Coming to USA, we felt as pond-fish thrown into a big ocean, deep
and wide; we were supported
and challenged. We needed no planned obsolescence of things, matters,
and ideas; we could dispense with a feeling of being trapped in an
unending “koe-to si-ki (過渡時期,
transition
period),” as our parents/grandparents often said with knitted brows,
and as people in Taiwan today still do. We could no longer tactfully
grab things and quickly leave the scene, as we often did in Taiwan.
We had nowhere else to flee but stand “here” to shoulder
responsibilities for what we were supposed to do. At the same time,
we felt how “planting melon seeds would harvest melons,” how a
measure of our efforts would yield a measure of harvest. For all
this, some measures of culture shock were inevitable.
