Lost in Translation

Understanding Chinese Culture as an American

Image Caption: A person stands in the middle of a busy street with a pink t-shirt and short cropped hair. There are red lanterns hanging from strings behind them.

For Westerners, it is common to claim that divergent cultures have an otherness. When Westerners first began their interactions with East Asian cultures, they needed to devise terms to understand the new cultures they were interacting with. Westerners use separate terms for East Asian thought and culture to highlight cultural difference, but as these…