INTERNATIONAL CAREERS : A World of Opportunity : Battling Culture Shock Starts With Trip to Local Bookstores, Seminars : Advance preparation is critical in adjusting to the challenges of life in a foreign country.

So you want to work overseas and see the world.

It sounds great, but try to make a call on a public telephone in your new country--even if you are fortunate enough to speak the language. Try mastering the public transportation system. Try learning the acceptable way to speak to a colleague, an employer, a servant.

“When you’re put into a new culture, even simple things will throw you. You become like a child again, unable to handle everyday life without help,” said L. Robert Kohls, who teaches intercultural studies and is the author of “Survival Kit for Overseas Living,” a book designed to help Americans adjust to life in a new culture.

A person who wants to work overseas but is unprepared to handle an enormous and inevitable wave of culture shock is at risk for washing out and returning home before his or her term is completed, Kohls said.

“Culture shock happens because people are programmed like computers, by their parents from the moment of birth, with more than a thousand assumptions and values from their own culture,” Kohls said.

“When you go overseas as an adult, you expect people of goodwill to have the same values as you have, when the reality is that their values may be different or at great odds with your own.”

For David Mans, an attorney hired in 1987 as a consultant to a South Korean law firm, culture shock began with a simple trip to a supermarket in Seoul.

“I kind of expected to get there and find a Vons on the corner,” he recalled. “Instead, it was almost frightening to find that I did not even recognize the food, let alone know how to prepare it. I literally lived on ham and cheese sandwiches for six months.”

Studies have shown that 30% to 60% of expatriates suffer serious culture shock. Another 20% have very little trouble adjusting because they enjoy change and challenges. But even those who adjust well would do better with some advance preparation.

Taking an intercultural studies or anthropology course at a university or attending one of the many classes offered for business people going abroad is an important way to reduce the stress of culture shock, said Elsie Purnell, the founder and director of a Pasadena counseling agency called Third Culture Family Services.

She counsels people going overseas to expect culture shock and to try to anticipate and be prepared for it. Someone living in a new culture typically goes through four stages of adjustment:

Stage one: Initial euphoria, or the honeymoon stage, is characterized by high expectations, a focus on similarities with the new culture and a feeling that one’s surroundings are charming, quaint and picturesque. This phase typically lasts about three weeks.

Stage two: Culture shock begins very suddenly and lasts three to four months.

“You may have been on the top of your profession back home, but now you’ve lost confidence in everything around you. The whole society is a big, dizzying question mark, and you find it hard to believe you’ll ever get through it,” Kohls said.

The symptoms of culture shock include anxiety, homesickness, helplessness, boredom, depression, fatigue, confusion, self-doubt, inadequacy, unexplained weeping and mild paranoia, he said.

Some people in the throes of culture shock simply withdraw from the new culture, spending most of their free time reading American novels, sleeping 12 hours a night and associating only with other Westerners.

Others eat and drink too much, experience irritability, family tension or marital stress, or display hostility, verbal or even physical aggression.

Stage three: Next comes a period of gradual adjustment. “Once you realize you’re adjusting, life gets more hopeful,” Kohls said.

“You’ve been watching what’s been going on, interpreting things, and you’re starting to recognize the patterns and learn the underlying values of the culture. You find you can control your life, predict how people will respond to you, and you feel more at home, more natural and more comfortable.”

Stage four: Full adjustment takes several years to achieve and does not occur in all expatriates.

“A lot depends on the person’s personality--how rigid or how easygoing they are--and how seriously they take the job of understanding and acclimating to the new culture,” Kohls said.

Children need special help adjusting to different cultures.

Purnell advises parents to teach their children as much as possible about their new culture, including through language courses if possible.

“I encourage them to learn to eat the foods of that culture and read books about that culture that are written for their age level,” Purnell said. She recommends that families make a trip to Shen’s Bookstore, 821 S. 1st Ave. in Arcadia, a multicultural children’s bookshop that specializes in books on Asia but also carries books about Europe.