THE playwright David Henry Hwang has been in high demand in China in recent years — not for works like his Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly,” which is essentially banned there, but because of his standing as the only son of Asia to be represented regularly on Broadway. In 2005 he was invited to Shanghai to discuss Broadway-style shows that might fill the lavish cultural centers under construction across the country. Yet China’s appreciation for status symbols like Broadway and Mr. Hwang did not translate into understanding more mundane aspects of American life.

“We went to one brand-new cultural center that had gorgeous Italian marble, fine Brazilian wood, smart German design and these horribly translated signs for handicapped restrooms that read, ‘Deformed Man’s Toilet,’ ” Mr. Hwang recalled. “You saw this over and over — an eagerness among Chinese and Americans to impress one another, yet wildly basic misunderstandings because of language and cultural differences. I realized I’d never seen a play deal with this, where the characters are groping to relate to each other while keeping the dignity of their own language.”

Mr. Hwang’s latest play, “Chinglish,” now in preview performances on Broadway at the Longacre Theater, is his effort to grapple with East-West relations from a vantage point that is new for him. Starting with his earliest plays at Stanford — his first, “FOB,” went straight from a dormitory production to a run at the Public Theater in New York in 1980 — he has explored multiculturalism, the stranger-in-a-strange-land tensions that affect Asian-Americans and others of hyphenated ethnicity. With “Chinglish,” which has no Asian-American characters, Mr. Hwang has moved on from multiculturalism (“it’s no longer cutting edge,” he said) to consider internationalism today, specifically the frustrations experienced by Americans and Chinese who are united in capitalist greed but divided by their cultural sensibilities.

The New York production may well create its own cultural divides. Some English-speaking theatergoers will be put off by parts of “Chinglish,” given that about a quarter of the dialogue is in Mandarin. (English supertitles will be projected onto a stage wall.) Mr. Hwang, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, isn’t fluent in Mandarin, so he had his lines translated by associates.