An American in China

I am thrilled to have been placed in China for my term abroad. I have been to Hong Kong once before, but this will be my first time in mainland China. I have some knowledge about Chinese culture, but it is limited and lacking personal experience. I look forward to the opportunity to be immersed in a new culture, and I hope to prepare myself well for this experience.

As I discovered through the Cultural-Context Inventory, I personally score fairly high in the high context category. As it turns out, America is a largely low context culture. I had never been exposed to these context categories before, but they make a lot of sense to me in light of my score and how I feel that I fit into my own culture. Especially in the areas of learning style and perception of time, I have at times felt constrained by my culture because I do not hold the same views of these topics that the larger society does. However, I was excited to find that China is a predominantly a high context culture. I look forward to experiencing a culture that I may already share some similar views with. Of course I realize that cultural barriers will certainly still exist in abundance, however I hope that it may be a smoother transition because of the shared views. 

One of my characteristics that is also reflected in high context cultures is the preference of identifying with a group. Although I may have this ideal in common with my Chinese peers, I fear that I may struggle at first because I will be on my own in China. I look forward to making friends and forming a community with individuals at the university, but I realize that this may happen slowly due to language barriers, cultural differences and simply being new to the school. I hope that I am not in a situation that give me too much time on my own. I have found that I do not naturally  thrive in situations where I feel alone for extended periods of time. However, I do enjoy independence and the satisfaction of accomplishing tasks on my own. Ideally, I will be able to reconcile these two tendencies within myself so that I can simultaneously embrace being on my own at times, while also being motivated to pursue relationships and engage with the community.