My Personal Journey

From 2008 to 2009, I participated in the (Chinese) Hanban-(American) College Board Chinese Teacher programme. I had been assigned to a high school in a Midwestern state, teaching Chinese to IB&AP (International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement) standard, known from 2010 as ‘Confucius classroom’. This year abroad was an important milestone in my personal and career path. Away from the comfort zone of mother tongue and social circumstances, encountering culture shock and various adversities, I felt hesitant and puzzled. As D.H. Lawrence describes, I was taken ‘out of the glass bottle of [my] ego and ... escape[d] like the squirrels in the cage of personality and into the forest’; I also ‘shiver[ed] with cold and fright’, but was not overwhelmed; I caught a glimpse of the unknown part of myself and let the ‘unlying life rush in’ (Lawrence, 1928, cited in Jones, 2007).

In 2010, I went to the UK to further my study, by conducting the research into Chinese teachers abroad that is the subject of the present volume. Once again living as a foreigner in an Anglophone country, daily life immersed me in the relationships between language and power, and the inevitable invisible, but nevertheless real, attendant tensions. In the meantime, I was intuitively aware of the changes to self-concept that were affecting my peers and me, as a function of the efforts we were making to adjust to British academia and society. Having been an international student in the UK and a Chinese teacher in the USA, I gained a renewed sense of compassion and empathy for L2 sojourners and this gave rise to a number of questions. How could my personal experiences and study help other sojourners in similar circumstances? Could my research findings be generalised to other sojourners working abroad? In short, this study of international professionals germinated as a journey of self-discovery to satisfy my curiosity.

The opportunity to teach Chinese was made possible by the burgeoning Confucius Institute (CI) programme, details of which can be found in Chapter 2.