Culture Shock : Foreign Exchange Students Find Life a Little Different in Small Towns

It’s a small world after all, Kin Sau Kwok discovered when she came to America. A small town, at least.

No wonder the 18-year-old suffered a case of culture shock when she traveled from Hong Kong (population 7 million) to spend a year studying in Myrtle Point, Ore. (population 2,300).

“I was thinking I would end up in New York or Los Angeles when I first heard I was coming,” she said with a shrug.

Kwok was among 800 teen-agers gathered Tuesday at El Segundo High School to end a year as AFS exchange students in communities across the western United States. As they waited for planes at nearby Los Angeles International Airport to take them home, there was time to exchange stories.

Call it small talk.

“Downtown where I stayed was only a quarter-mile long,” said Atthaphon Chantharasopha, who traded Uthai Thani, Thailand (population 200,000) for Globe, Ariz. (population 6,500). “They have a JCPenney store, one movie theater and a Woolworth’s. I got sick of the cowboy music they listened to all the time. I wasn’t sure I could make it a year there.”

Eighteen-year-old Gregoire Strozzi swapped the French Riviera for Milton-Freewater, Ore. “My family there was lost in the country--really isolated. After two weeks, I asked to change,” he said of the community of 2,006.

Danish student Dan Jakobsen, 17, lived in Willow Creek, Calif. (population 1,000). “It was in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “Everybody in town knew everybody. If you did anything wrong, like mispronounce words, everybody in town knew about it the next day.”

Finnish student Anne Peravainio, 18, stayed in Round Mountain, Nev., an open-pit gold-mining town of 3,000 that is a five-hour drive from either Las Vegas or Reno.

Indonesian teen-ager Reny Soeroyo left her hometown of 1.5 million people to spend a year in compact Billings, Mont. “There weren’t many places for teen-agers to hang out,” said the 17-year-old. “I’d thought that cities in America were big. I guess that’s the stereotypical view.”

But it turns out that small towns are a big deal to those who welcome exchange students to the United States these days.

“It’s hard to find hosts in large cities where there’s lots of apartment living and two-career couples,” said Scott Ramey, a New York-based administrator for AFS, the nonprofit group that found U.S. homes for 2,800 foreign students during the past school year. It also sent 2,600 American teen-agers abroad.

“People tend to have bigger homes and extra beds in small towns. It’s also more novel and exotic to have a foreign guest when you live there. There’s more of a hospitality factor in small-town America.”

Most students admitted that they ended up having a big time in their tiny towns.

“Myrtle Point was very peaceful. Oregon was very beautiful. I liked it,” Kwok said.

Chantharasopha was voted Prom King at his 700-student high school and bought Western music CDs and a cowboy hat to take home with him Tuesday.

Strozzi grew to like seeing cows and apple trees everywhere and has vowed to return to the Pacific Northwest someday. “I grew up a lot living there,” he acknowledged.

Jakobsen became a sports hero at his 280-pupil campus, winning varsity letters in football, basketball and track that he proudly wore home on his red Hoopa High letterman’s jacket.

And 19-year-old Belgian student An Van Geem--who says she came “expecting Beverly Hills 90210” but ended up living on a farm outside Gilroy, Calif.--nodded knowingly when she encountered Gyula Knizse, 17, of Hungary. He spent the year living in Beverly Hills with a film studio vice president’s family.

The family was great, Knizse said. “But Beverly Hills wasn’t like a real American community. Money ruled Beverly Hills High--students were snobby and arrogant. I really didn’t make many friends there.”

Van Geem said she had so much fun in Gilroy that she’s returning there this winter to spend Christmas with her host family and friends.