As I lay dying in the hotel room, I knew Pakistan, the country himself, was trying to kill me. He was a malevolent god “that [held me] over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, [abhorred me], and [was] dreadfully provoked”. We were at war, and I was losing. Each new moment spent in this maw of Hell, Karachi, was another moment closer to final torment. I had to escape immediately from the stench of burning meat and open sewage, from the glass-eyed and dour-faced demons sizing me up through a greasy haze of petrol exhaust and honking horns, plotting how best to rob and cheat me. I had to escape from this shiftless and shabby nation of criss-crossing and unmarked streets, of unplumb building corners, of wiggly and slapdash lines in the road, of exposed wiring, of filthy toilets and moldy showers, where nothing ran on time and a thousand insults and inconveniences were explained away with the flimsiest of excuses. I had to escape. And I did. I left Pakistan a month into my second visit after two weeks of diarrhea and several days of paranoia on a one-way Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, purchased at exorbitant cost only one day before and at the higher cost of insulting my friends and hosts. But I was free.
 
This was culture shock. So, when, in the course of my studies, I read the cross-cultural travel narratives, Typee by Herman Melville and La Relacion by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, their experiences resonated with mine, both the good and the bad. Spread out as we are by five centuries, two continents, two nations, two languages, three religions, and thousands of changes in social mores and beliefs, our stories are more similar than different. We shared something universal to travelers among strange people in strange places–culture shock, a much bandied term that actually has a prescribed meaning to scholars of intercultural communications.
 
Doing research for this essay, I found no literary criticism applying this particular understanding of culture shock to texts. Most of the literature relating to this phenomena is in the behavioral sciences and education, or else summaries of studies by those disciplines. There were a couple of texts cited in the databases that have “culture shock” in the title, but the ones I looked at used the term only in the ordinary sense. There were many references to postcolonial criticisms of Typee and La Relacion. These are valid and important perspectives, but I will not explore them in this essay. The particular cultural inter-weavings of sixteenth century imperialistic Spanish and Native American cultures, and of nineteenth century Yankee whalers with Pacific Islanders, are not to be discounted, but here I’m speaking of the universal.
 
There’s a fly in the ointment: If I’m going to use Typee and La Relacion as artifacts of the culture shock experience, they are not completely reliable. Both are first person narratives written after the fact to achieve certain rhetorical aims. Melville altered his autobiography to the point of fictionalizing himself as the narrator, Tommo, and changing the time he spent with the Taipai from four weeks to four months. He was writing to entice the paying fans of travel stories, those who wanted thrilling adventures in exotic locales. Cabeza de Vaca’s journey spanned ten years, and La Relacion was written five years after his arrival in Mexico City with the aim of gaining favor with the crown and better treatment for the Native Americans. Even in my case, my memories of Pakistan are eighteen years old; I am a different man now ripping a yarn to demonstrate certain ideas. It would be better, for the purposes of science, to rely on unedited journals, but we work with what we have. If my narrators tend to embellish and mold, the power of our stories comes from reliving those moments of original experience stored on the videos of our minds.
