Pre-Departure Knowledge

Abstract

When I conducted my pilot interviews, I had a list of themes and questions I had planned to ask my interviewees which had been informed by both my own experience and an initial literature review. I am almost ashamed to admit that I had underestimated what turned out to be probably the most important and most passionately argued topic of the subsequent interviews conducted for this study: the importance of cultural as well as linguistic understanding. When I went to China for the first time in 1997, I could already speak Chinese at a lower-intermediate level, so even though communication was still tiring and strenuous, I could nonetheless survive on my own, and this is probably one of the reasons why in my pilot study I had underestimated how overwhelming it is to go to China without being able to speak the language at all (especially before the 2000s, when it was very rare to find an English-speaking host national). All 18 interviewees in Zimmermann, Holman and Sparrow’s study (2003) on German expatriate adjustment in China agreed that language is the most basic need in terms of interaction adjustment, which mirrors the unanimous responses of my interviewees.

Truth makes you stronger; wisdom makes things valuable; knowledge gives the true value of power.

Chinese proverb