Chinese and Americans often approach each other with very different assumptions and perceptions. These contribute significantly to the difficulties persistently marring Sino-American interactions. They have inspired, in turn, stock American images of the inscrutable Chinese.

This complex issue is the most prominent yet least understood chapter in US–China relations. The bewildering uncertainty bedeviling exchanges between Chinese and Americans regularly occurs across a range of international and national settings despite dramatic shifts in historical, ideological, and political winds. It also reappears in the cross-cultural interactions of Americans with some of the English-speaking children and grandchildren of transplanted Chinese in the United States. Surprisingly enough, despite historic recognition of the issue, and despite a large literature on the subject, the process by which it occurs and continues to occur has not received systematic attention.

This book represents my attempt to come to grips with this recalcitrant issue. What I shall describe, analyze, and explain are some underlying sources and typical displays of Chinese communicative behavior. What I am interested in are some of the wider implications for the pattern of perceptions and interactions that exists between Chinese and Americans; that is, for the way in which they come to view each other.