This book is a unique, bilingual, cross-cultural reader in English and Simplified as well as Traditional Chinese characters. The text is composed of personal, often humorous, stories followed by innovative as well as more standard exercises to help learners become more proficient in their second language and culture while better understanding their first. The goal of foreign language education according to the (American) Modern Language Association's Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages is to raise translingual and transcultural competence. This is achieved through The Chopsticks-Fork Principle in that familiar events like traveling, the first day at school and birthdays are seen through foreign lenses tinted with good humor.