What is special about the pedagogical interaction between the mainland Chinese in/pre-service teachers and the author in a Hong Kong classroom? Trained at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a critical curriculum scholar, the author highly endorses and has implemented a student-centered research-based project-learning pedagogy with the homegrown mainland Chinese students who have been used to a predominant spoon-feeding pedagogy from K-College. One key element of that pedagogy is for students to do peer presentations in class, hoping to create an engaging learning community for all. An interesting phenomenon occurred: while the students warmly welcomed the idea of project-based learning, they seemed to always hold a nonchalant attitude to all their peers' presentations. Nonchalant in a double sense of seldom looking at the presenters and rarely posing interactive questions. In other words, the intended goal of creating an interactive learning community through peer presentations was not fulfilled. In-depth individual interviews were conducted afterwards and a close analysis of their discourses finds some interesting Chinese historical-cultural-educational styles of reasoning shared among the students that help to account for students' seemingly nonchalant engagement, whether cognitive, behavioral, or emotional. Before unpacking these styles of reasoning, the author gives a brief introduction of this Hong Kong university teacher education program, its appeal to (these) mainland Chinese students, and her project-learning pedagogy. This article, by unpacking the shared historical-cultural-educational styles of reasoning that legitimate and constrain the way the mainland Chinese pre/in-service teachers thinks, hopes to provide some implications for internationalized or cross-cultural pedagogical engagement with (teacher) education programs in mainland China, Hong Kong, and beyond.