- Fortune cookies are often thought of as being distinctively Chinese, but they do not originate from China and many Chinese people have never seen them. They were invented in America by enterprising Asian Americans.
- Many Westerners believe that "may you live in interesting times" is an ancient Chinese curse. Wrong. No such curse exists in Chinese. Not in ancient times and certainly not today.
- In a famous speech, President Kennedy said that wei ji, the Chinese characters for crisis, was the combination of "danger" and "opportunity." This little nugget of faux wisdom has been repeated many times by many people, including Al Gore, Tom Clancy, and more than a few Chinese Americans who don't know Chinese. The truth is wei ji means simply crisis and that's it. There is no profound hidden meaning behind the characters. Sometimes Westerners see wisdom in Chinese culture where there is actually nothing special.
- Many Westerners think the Buddha is fat because they see the image of the Chinese Maitreya Buddha and automatically assume it must be the Buddha. In reality, they are two very different people. The real Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama, an Indian Prince who lived about 2,500 years ago, while the portly Maitreya Buddha was Chieh Tsi, an eccentric Chinese monk who lived about 1,100 years ago.
- Some Westerners believe that every Chinese character has multiple definitions, and that is why Tao Te Ching translations can differ so much from one another. In reality, Chinese is just another human language, not so different from English in that some words have multiple meanings and some do not. When a word with multiple meanings is used in a sentence, one can tell which of the meanings applies by context.
One way to understand this is to realize that in China, traffic signs are in Chinese, and they certainly do not lend themselves to wildly different interpretatons. The drastic differences in English translations of the Tao Te Ching are not due to any imaginary complexities of the Chinese language. In most cases, they are due to the inability of the translators to grasp the basics of the Chinese language.
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