No you don't. When you go to a school as an ESL teacher, there will be other English teachers, and even if they are not foreigners they will be Chinese English teachers with good spoken English. So you will have some others you can communicate with. They will help you out with translators if necessary. Many of the older students will be happy to act as interpreters. We made many good friends of university students, they visited us in our apartment, and helped us endlessly with shopping etc. They consider it an honour to help out.
It will be much easier if you can say a few basic words. Also learn how to count to at least 100. You will need this for shopping. You are probably better to get a good phrase book, and a good Chinese English dictionary. If you buy a dictionary make sure it has the Chinese characters as well as the Pinyin, the word written in English, plus the English word.
Many schools provide lessons in Mandarin for teachers, and others will be happy to teach you the basics. But it is a very difficult language to learn. After a while you will gain confidence and be able to do many things on your own, getting buses and taxis, shopping etc. For complicated things like banking or government offices take a translator, it will be much easier.
On the whole though, I found that after a while I got very confident, and with very basic Chinese language skills and lots of sign and body language I did very well.
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