'The Slippery are Very Crafty': David Henry Hwang's Chinglish and the Politics of Translation

How do understandings of China emerge in the U.S., where racial paradigms rooted in orientalism and Yellow Peril frameworks collide with newer discourses of China's rise? And how does the presence of emboldened return gaze challenge the stance of distance and authority historically used to render China in the U.S. imagination? This essay examines how David Henry Hwang's play Chinglish explores these questions through the lens of cultural translation, crafting a narrative about U.S.-China relations that emphasises lapses and misunderstandings, the politics of untranslatability, and the weight that history, geography, and imperialism hold on intercultural exchanges.