Here I discuss the dialogue that takes place between my Chinese university students and myself (their teacher) as we study the images of China presented in a series of Western literary texts. Our first problem is to distinguish between the Chinese image in the mind of an individual (author), the image in the collective thinking of a group (society, culture) and the media image. Then historical and cultural relativism come into play: we must be aware of the historical reality at the time of occurrence of an image which now seems “unreal,” and of the truth to Westerners of an image which may seem fantastic or distorted to Chinese (and vice versa). These are the sorts of modalities I discuss with my students as we analyze texts, and both sides in this East-West “dialogue” gain a deeper understanding: we become more conscious of one another’s underlying cultural presuppositions, the lenses through which we view (our images of) one another.