In this collective essay the authors consider the nature and consequences of reading and researching across difference in an international and intergenerational team, whose core members are focused on understanding how curriculum operates and the nature of textbook representation of diversity in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. Examining textbook reading across and about difference as senior and junior curriculum theorists, emerging educational researchers, and recent secondary school graduates with varied international and cross-border experiences, the authors consider how their unique positions and experiences--as well as the political and social context of schooling, and the abstraction, simplification, and reduction of reality which textbook production entails--influences understandings of the value of curriculum theory and textbook research. The insights of this essay shed light on such topics as how textbooks are seen across difference, read in academic and school settings, experienced based on identity and subjectivity, and taken up in understanding broader nation-state politics. In sum, the authors critically ask here what textbooks and textbook research are 'for' from an international view, given the dynamic ways that reading and collaborative scholarship work.