L. Frank Baum’s book, as most would know, wrote “The Wizard of Oz” and then a series of books built around Dorothy Gale and her visits to the Land of Oz. In the 1939 movie, the visit was brief and actually just a dream. In the book, the initial visit lasted close to two months, and Oz was to be seen as a very real place. I think this scenario can help us understand reverse culture shock.
I think most people know what culture shock is. You go to a new culture (such as Dorothy going from Kansas in the United States (US) to Oz) and at first the differences are weird, curious, or charming. Soon, however, they are frustrating, annoying, and perhaps even rage-inducing. This is culture shock. Over time, it started to wear off, just as Dorothy started to feel more comfortable as she started to have friends within the culture and she became familiar with the cultural idiosyncrasies.
After a time in the new culture one returns home, just as Dorothy did to Kansas. In that situation a person may feel a certain amount of stress, disorientation, and more in returning to one’s own culture. Dorothy certainly would have experienced some amount of reverse culture shock after returning home.
I am not an expert on reverse culture shock, beyond the fact that I am living through it now. I think, however, that there are at least three ways reverse culture shock may hit one.
#1. Dorothy Changes Due to the Second Culture. One does not return home unchanged. Dorothy was changed by living in Oz, even if only for a few weeks. Returning home, Kansas will seem a bit strange. The culture shock may not be huge or long-lasting, but things will be strange and unfamiliar at first. I lived in the Philippines for 21 years. That affected me so that being in the US does seem strange a bit. However, in a few days, that type of reverse culture shock largely leaves.
#2. The Home Culture Changes. Dorothy returned to Kansas after only 2 months, but not only did Dorothy change, but Kansas changed. She left with a tornado. She returned to a post-tornado home. Things change. While I was living in the Philippines, the US kept changing over those 21 years. For the 24 years that my wife had been out of the Philippines, living in the US, the Philippines kept changing. When she returned to the Philippines, she was in some ways entering a new land. When I returned to the US in 2025, I assure you, it was not the country I left. To be brutally honest, in most ways it seemed to me that the US got worse in those two decades. That is hard. It is a form of reverse culture shock that does not go away as fast. Taking another example. I was raised in an old farmhouse in upstate New York. I went off to college but would visit back home pretty regularly. It was always pretty homey and familiar. When I went in to the military, I would also return and it would feel like home. But one day we had a house fire, and my old home suffered major damage. I still would return home… but it did not feel the same. It was different. My home was in some sense gone, just as for me, 2004 United States is gone, and for my wife, 1980 Philippines is gone.
#3. Looking Behind the Curtain. In the story (definitely in the movie at least… it has been many years since I read the book) a great pivotal scene is where Dorothy is before the Great Oz, the ruler of the Emerald City (and perhaps Oz as a whole). She is scared to challenge someone so powerful and authoritative. Toto, her dog, then pulls back the curtain, revealing that the “Great Oz” was a little old man— in fact a very ordinary and unpowerful con man. And then she returns to Kansas. But she cannot unsee what she saw. She cannot unlearn what she learned. The powers and institutions are as likely to be fraudulent in Kansas as they were in Oz. It is likely that when one sees the world, one will not see things back home the same way… ever. When in the Philippines, I was surprised to realize how internationally knowledgeable and savvy the typical Filipino is. Going back to the US, I could not unsee how parochial Americans are. During a 3-week visit to the US in 2018, I started watching news in the US and seeing how limited (and limiting) the news was. All the news was about what happened in the United States or what was happening in other parts of the world that directly related to the United States. The ONLY news item in all that time with no direct relationship to the US I saw during that time was the eruption of a volcano in Guatemala. I can no longer see the news in the US without filtering it through this knowledge. Another example is that while spending 21 years in the Philippines, I spent 21 years as a racial minority, of which I spent 20 years and 4 months as a legal alien and 8 months as an illegal alien. When I am in the US and talks come up about race relations, immigration, and illegal aliens, I can no longer look at those issues the way most of my friends would because they lack the experience I had.
Putting this all together.
If we take those items, 1 through 3,, as three types of reverse cultural stress, I think that.
–Type 1 cultural stress is the easiest and fastest to work through.
–Type 2 cultural stress can be much harder and slower to work through, if one has been away long enough.
–Type 3 cultural stress can last a lifetime.
However, stress is not always bad.
