Francis L.K. Hsu’s Americans and Chinese (Huaxia Publishing House, 1989) has a number of genuine merits:

  • Tight structure. The author’s framework lays out Chinese-American differences thoroughly — from personal needs like the art of living and relationships between the sexes, to intricate social activities, to the weaknesses of each nation’s culture.

  • Individual life as the throughline. The author avoids the trap of organizing the book chronologically. Doing so would implicitly assume that differences are subordinate to time — but as we know, many customs don’t change with the times at all.

  • Broad sourcing for its arguments. The author draws material from both historical anecdotes and current affairs.

  • No blind deference. The author has his own views on the work of those who came before him, and offers deep reflection on social activity. The book is full of genuinely insightful observations.

However, this particular edition’s translation is a real disaster. Careful readers on Douban have already compiled quite a few errors (see here); I’ll just add a few of my own here:

  • “Yousenmaite National Park” (p. 95) — now commonly known as Yosemite.

  • “For the first thirty years, one admires the father and tends to the children; for the last thirty years, one admires the son and respects the father” (p. 111). The common saying is actually: “for the first thirty years, look to the father and respect the son; for the last thirty years, look to the son and respect the father.”

  • “Life Is Worth Living” (p. 118, rendered in Chinese) — an odd translation; the original title is “Life Is Worth Living.”

  • “锲而不舍” misspelled as “楔而不舍” (p. 128) — simply a typo.

  • “OB Cooper” (p. 169) — should be “D.B. Cooper.”

If these transliteration issues could be chalked up to the limited access to information at the time, the logical confusion elsewhere is much harder to excuse. For instance, on page 98:

Many Chinese people today, myself included, are surprised to learn that Genghis Khan and his successors viewed China merely as one province of their vast empire — surprising because Chinese history books simply present Mongol rule as the Yuan dynasty.

This sentence has neither a coherent causal relationship nor anything genuinely surprising about it (by the translator’s own logic). So what does the original English actually say?

It is something of a surprise for many a present day Chinese, including myself, to learn that Genghis Khan and his successors considered China only as a province of his much vaster empire, since the Mongol rule was presented in Chinese books simply as a dynasty (3rd edition, University of Hawaii Press, page 103)

You can see that a much better rendering would be: “Many Chinese people would be quite surprised to learn that Genghis Khan and his successors regarded China as merely a ‘province’ of the Mongol Empire, since history books simply classify their rule as the Yuan dynasty.”

There are many more lapses in logic like this throughout the translation. On top of that, many of the book’s citations don’t appear properly in the body text — given how differently things are translated today, you can’t easily search for these books, whereas the original edition’s notes and index are perfectly clear. Granted, this translation is nearly 30 years old now, so some of this dated quality is to be expected. A retranslated edition was published this month (Nov. 2017) by Zhejiang People’s Publishing House — hopefully these issues have been addressed.