Intercultural Identity and Intercultural Experiences of American Students in China

Abstract

The number of international students in China is increasing rapidly, but their experiences in China remain largely unknown. This article reports an intensive longitudinal multiple case study that explores eight American students’ intercultural experiences and the impacts of such experiences on individual identity during their study in a Chinese university in 2010. Data come from monthly interviews and diaries that the students kept. Findings support Kim’s depiction of the processes by which intercultural identity emerges, notably the stress–adaptation–growth cycle and the concurrent processes of acculturation and deculturation. These findings reveal the journey of participants from cultural naivety to an emergent intercultural awareness and cultural critical capacity. Despite considerable ignorance and misunderstanding about China as an exotic “other” at the beginning of the program, all participants underwent some degree of cultural identity shift toward the more “open-ended . . . self–other orientation” of Kim’s “intercultural identity.”

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 86 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.