Abstrakt
Donpan Wu is a musician who has recently moved from China to the Czech Republic to study local Chinese diasporic music. His personal trajectory (from China through South Africa to the Czech Republic) has been turbulent and influenced by factors which he has not been used to think about (vis-a-vis the researcher's position).
During the first weeks of his stay, he has also been facing various obstacles common to most of the migrants from so-called third countries to the Czech Republic; both from the Czech state administration side (based on rather strict immigration policies) and from the relatively xenophobic Czech society. Moreover, he has been struggling to find his way into the local Chinese community.
A dialogue with a Czech ethnomusicologist creates an opportunity for reflecting upon the cultural shock, for mutual understanding of stimuli of this specific migration trajectory, and more broadly, for strategies applied by migrants in the Czech Republic. Although the study of ethnomusicology can hardly be considered as a common migration strategy, it reveals some more general patterns of migrants' decision-making process.
It also points towards a new political constellation of Czech-Chinese relations that have emerged during the last three years.The conference presentation will take the form of a dialogue which will contain the most important parts of the past interviews.