``IT all started when I looked down from the window of the plane taking me back home to Beijing," said Christina Zhao who recently returned to China after one year's study in the UK.

"How could the sky be so dusky and the snow be black? I wondered. Before long I woke up to the fact that I had grown up all along in such an environment."

More of the same came to Zhao in profusion in the months following her return to her homeland after a year's absence, raising more serious issues than the dusky sky and black snow could do.

"I grew accustomed to saying thank you, yet people say I am being false; I acquired dedication and attention to every detail, yet people say I take things too seriously; I would challenge my boss when I thought it necessary for the good of our work, yet people say I am too assertive..." Zhao could go on with her list.

Whatever you call this - reverse culture shock or re-entry culture shock - it is a predicament many returnees get blasted with in varying degrees when they arrive home from overseas.

"It is frustrating" said Zhao. "People cannot understand the other culture I lived in and how I now see things in China, some of which I feel very uncomfortable with, such as not queuing for public transport, spitting on the streets, making an uproar in public and being nosy about others' private affairs. Then they get mad and think I am being too critical."

Zhao is not alone. From a casual survey of a handful of returnees recently returned to China from overseas, the Shanghai Star found that almost all returnees experience culture shock upon their return to their homeland - as much as they did when they landed in the foreign land for the first time.

Returning with high and sometimes unrealistic expectations, many have found themselves having difficulties adapting to their own homeland due to their exposure to new knowledge, new rituals and new traditions.

Shocking business

To many of the returnees, culture shock found in a corporate context is more frustrating than that in a societal context.

Behaviour such as challenging your boss at work proves puzzling to other people.

After a few failed attempts to reason with her seniors at the magazine she works for, Zhao learned to be quiet, fully aware of the fact that a Chinese work place is characterized by a rigid hierarchy where staff at the bottom of the ladder are in no position to challenge their seniors whatsoever.

"Though my intention was simply to make my point of view known, my seniors seemed to find me showy and aggressive. Now feeling tired of such accusations, I just do whatever I am told to do," Zhao said.

Returnee from France Ingrid Sun, however, chooses not to compromise, even at the risk of jeopardizing her career with the company where she works as a marketing officer.

"My personality does not allow me to keep silent when I spot a potential issue," Sun said. "At any rate, I expect the situation in a Chinese work place to change for the better as more and more foreign companies come into China, bringing with them Western management ideology and practice."

When she was working in France, Sun explained, she argued with her boss on any issue where she held a different view. The boss would either take her argument or leave it, without feeling he was being humiliated or having his authority challenged.

Another often-cited shock concerns working overtime and how it is perceived in a Chinese work place. Staff who are seen around the office after the normal office hours are perceived to be hardworking employees, observes David Xue, a returnee from the UK, who is now working for a higher education institution.

"But the fact is, more often than not, they (his colleagues) do things unrelated to their work during office hours and work when it is time to go home," said Xue. "Procrastination seems to be the norm."

Drawing on her experiences in the United States, an anonymous online writer examined this culture of over-working in a lengthy article on reverse culture shock, widely quoted on the Internet.

In a culture that extols individuality, she wrote, 99 out of 100 Americans choose family over work, the one who makes the alternative choice is considered a workaholic, whereas in China or other Asian societies - where conformity is stressed - bosses tend to think their employees are their assets and hence working overtime is a matter of course.

The returnee from the United States ended up working twice as long as her counterparts with the same consulting company in the US. "After working like this for over half a year, I was suddenly hit by a sense of loss - loss of self," she wrote in her article.

Image problem

The biggest shock of all, however, is a rather recent phenomenon - the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of the returnees, whose nickname has "degenerated" from haigui (or sea turtle, a Chinese pun for returnees from overseas) to haidai (or sea weed, also a pun meaning returnees from overseas waiting for jobs) over a span of three to five years.

It is not hard to see the logic behind this. When China first opened up in the late 1970s, studying abroad was an honour reserved for top achievers and most of the returnees from the old days were assigned key positions due to their advanced skills and international perspective, explained Wang Huiyao, a leading researcher into Western-trained returnees.

The further opening-up of China and the demand for foreign students at international institutions in recent years has made going abroad much more commonplace. In some cases, lower-tier institutions have made special concessions for international students to increase their diversity, sometimes compromising on the quality of applicants just to fill quotas.

"Though the demand for highly trained and experienced returnees is still there, fresh graduates from Chinese universities with little work experience who then go on to study abroad may find it hard to compete with local talent whose capability has been raised and groomed in the Chinese market," said Wang.

Not surprisingly, many stories have been told about the seemingly dire situation of some returnees: a UK returnee who had invested 20,000 pounds

(US$38,000) in his overseas education now has to make do with a monthly salary of 2,000 yuan (US$242); a US-trained PhD now serves as nothing more than a full-time interpreter for his homeland bosses...

Yet, Sun argues, the media should not confuse a part for the whole: "I think the ongoing media sensation on haigui turning into haidai appeals to our national psyche, which delights in finding fault with others' achievements as a form of self-consolation."

Echoing her view is Bess Yin, a public relations officer at the British Council in China: "The reporting on haigui and haidai again points to the trend of 'making a havoc of it before further proof' in the Chinese media. The returnees, with their unusual experiences and more worldly attitudes, seem to have been singled out for public gossip."