Afterward: Our Return, The Library and Our Friends

by Hugh M. Lewis

Our return from China was marked by a continuous state of being ill at ease. Wherever we traveled, we found we could not feel comfortable or quite at home with our surroundings. It was a very basic and, in hindsight, a very deep feeling, that did not where off even after a couple of years. Its exact dimensions are difficult to describe with any precision--it was an amorphous, vague sense of feeling chronically ill at ease in one's surroundings. It was in fact a feeling a don't remember ever quite having before, and if I were to give it a clinical diagnosis I would say it was a strange kind of neurosis that was more than a condition of reverse culture shock.