Foreign Service Reading List
Culture Shock! Successful Living Abroad: A Wife's Guide
By Robin Pascoe
I've been a U.S. diplomatic wife for the past twelve years, but I only recently read A Wife's Guide for the first time. How I wish I had read it when my husband first signed up with the Foreign Service! Ms. Pascoe's observations about social life and the "pecking order" in Embassy communities overseas would have been a refreshing counterpoint to the blandly optimistic viewpoint which dominated the materials I received from the U.S. State Department. (Turns out, my skepticism was justified.)
As it was, with all those years behind me, I found myself laughing at loud in recognition of some of the types described in the book: the husband whose ego inflates like a hot-air balloon as the plane lands and he assumes the mantle of Diplomat and the wife who soon learns to boycott cocktail parties in defense of her self-esteem and her waistline.
This book's primary strength is the attention paid to a wife's mental state upon arrival at a foreign post. It's hard--very hard--and only a person who had gone through the experience herself several times could possibly describe the situation accurately and give helpful advice on how to cope with that unique and deadly trio of culture shock, exhaustion, and plummeting self-esteem. Ms. Pascoe's advice, which can be boiled down to "recognize the problem, insist that your husband recognize it as well, and do whatever works for you to get through it," is sound and invaluable, no matter how many times you've packed out and moved in.
Fortunately, this unique expatriate/diplomatic universe is changing for the better. While I recognized many of the characters and problems in A Wife's Guide, it also occured to me that domineering wives of senior diplomats and inconsiderate, workaholic husbands are becoming somewhat rarer, largely because many expatriate wives are becoming less tolerant of these sorts of behavior than they might once have been. The expatriate community still exists in a time warp, but the gap between it and the modern Western world is slowly narrowing, perhaps because with modern communications, no outpost is completely isolated any more. Yes, there are still many hardships, and many striking cultural differences, but now we can get online, read our hometown news, and cry on our old friends' shoulders, at least via email. Many of us even manage to telecommute and preserve at least some of our own financial independence along with our self-esteem. What a difference a decade makes!
I enjoyed the book both because it is so accurate, and because it is becoming less so in many ways. I think that any person, either male of female, who is considering becoming a trailing spouse should read both A Wife's Guide and The Accidental Diplomat. In doing so, they will get the most complete description possible of both the hurdles that they will need to overcome in order to live a satisfying life as the wife of a person employed overseas, and of the even greater hurdles that others have overcome in the not-so-distant past.
--Kelly Bembry Midura, State Department spouse.
Find out more about this book at the author's website: http://www.expatexpert.com.