In the cultural communication between the East and the West, culture itself is a main obstacle. We will examine the cultural exchange between China and the West through the case of Gao Xingjian. Gao's case helps us see the difficulty of the writer's literary creation in a cross-cultural environment. In the transmission of culture, the writer has to give up some original meaning because no equivalent words and expressions can refer to it; therefore, the writer has to use some expressions that are close to the original meaning but will lose some denotations. We will study this phenomenon in this paper.