Before moving to Thailand, I started reading Thai literature in preparation. After I moved to Germany, I worked through German novels, history, and memoirs. Before and after moving to China, I immersed myself in Chinese fiction, historical accounts, and literary translations. Each move taught me the same thing: you don’t really understand a place until you’ve read what the people there are writing.
The Research Habit
Living somewhere gives you the surface. You learn the streets, the food, the rhythm of daily life. But reading gives you the subsurface. A novel shows you how people talk to each other when no one is watching. A history book tells you why things feel the way they feel even when no one mentions the past out loud. A memoir reveals what people carry with them that they’ll never put into a guidebook.
Early in my time in Thailand, Four Reigns by Kukrit Pramoj caught my attention. The novel follows a woman through decades of Thai history and taught me more about the country’s quiet transformations than any news article could. Another favorite, Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbantha, moves through time and space in a way that captures the city’s constant layering of past and present. A Good True Thai by Sunisa Manning brought the political turmoil of the 1970s into focus through characters who felt like real people. None of this was preparation. I read it all while I was already there, and the reading made the living richer.
The Same Method for Any Industry
When I need to write for an industry I don’t know well, I do the same thing. I read everything I can find. Not just the obvious sources like competitor websites and industry reports. Customer reviews on Reddit and Amazon. Forum arguments between people who care too much about minor technical details. The jokes people make about the industry and the complaints they repeat over and over. I do all of this while I’m starting to write, not before. The research and the drafting happen together.
In Germany, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin became an unexpected teacher. The novel throws you into the head of a former convict trying to go straight in Weimar Berlin. The language is strange and the rhythm is relentless, but it taught me something about German directness and dark humor that no contemporary business guide could have offered. Remarque and Grass and Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin came next, the latter capturing a city on the edge of disaster with a kind of desperate energy. History also played a role. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and The Proud Tower gave me the long view of how Germany got to where it was. All of this reading happened while I was learning to navigate German bureaucracy and waiting for late trains. The books didn’t prepare me for the country. They helped me understand it after I was already there.
The Difference Between Knowing and Understanding
You can learn the facts about an industry in an afternoon. Market size, key players, common terminology. That’s the Wikipedia version. It’s useful, but it’s shallow. Understanding comes from the novel version. It comes from spending enough time with the material that you start to hear the subtext. Which claims get taken seriously and which ones get laughed at. The difference between what people say they want and what they actually buy.
China offered a wealth of teachers. Mo Yan, whose blend of folk tale and brutal honesty won him the Nobel Prize. Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem, which showed me how Chinese science fiction uses genre to ask big questions about history and humanity. Wang Anyi’s Fu Ping, a quiet novel about a young woman from the countryside navigating Shanghai in the 1990s. Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution, which is really a story about trust, betrayal, and the impossibility of knowing anyone completely. Peter Hessler’s Other Rivers follows his return to China years after he first taught there and watches how the country and its people have changed. Shanghailanders by Juli Min moves backward in time through the lives of a wealthy Shanghai family. None of these books taught me how to order coffee or use Alipay. They taught me what kind of things make people in this culture laugh, what kind of things make them angry, and what kind of things they don’t talk about at all. I learned all of it after I arrived, not before. The reading and the living happened at the same time.
The Trust You Earn
When I tell a client that I’ve read deeply in their industry, they notice. It builds trust immediately. They don’t have to explain the basics to me. They don’t have to correct my assumptions. I’ve done the reading, which means I can start the conversation at a higher level.
More importantly, the reading protects me from writing something stupid. I’ve spent enough time with the material to know what’s been said a thousand times and what’s still worth saying. I know which angles are exhausted and which ones still have life in them. That’s the real value of the research habit. It doesn’t just make you smarter. It makes you less likely to embarrass yourself.
I’m currently looking for a copywriting role where I can bring this kind of deep research to brands that need copy written by someone who actually understands their world. If you’re tired of explaining the basics to writers who should have done their homework, view my portfolio or reach out. I’d love to show you what happens when someone reads the novels before writing the headlines.