Acknowledgments

Assistance in pursuing the study and translation of this curious little novel has come from many directions. Columbia University professor C. T. Hsia assigned the Chinese novel Xiyou bu to Robert Hegel as an MA thesis project, for which he is extremely grateful. This sparked Hegel’s unending interest in the novel, which in turn led to Qiancheng Li’s fascination since his years as Hegel’s student. For Li, this joint venture is foremost a tribute to his mentor’s exemplary career, as well as a token of gratitude for decades of friendship, guidance, and intellectual stimulation.

We would like to thank all the scholars who have studied this book, as well as its first translators, Shuen-fu Lin and Larry Schulz, for bringing the book to the English readership. Among the many younger scholars with whom he has enjoyed discussing the novel, Hegel thanks Qiancheng Li for the opportunity to work with him on a project sufficiently challenging that he would not have undertaken it by himself, despite his decades-long fascination with Further Adventures. The present translation could not have been accomplished if not for Li’s meticulous variorum edition of the novel, Xiyou bu jiaozhu.

As is Hegel, Li is grateful to the late Professor Anthony C. Yu, for his encouragement, advice, and insight. He owes intellectual debts to, among others, Beata Grant, John B. Henderson, Martin W. Huang, and Lynn Struve while working on this project.

We are both grateful to the National Library of China for allowing us to view microfilm versions of the original edition of the novel and to reproduce its illustrations here.

During the review process we received an extraordinarily detailed and helpful evaluation by a reader for the University of Washington Press who subsequently identified himself. We take this opportunity to acknowledge our deep indebtedness to Professor David Rolston of the University of Michigan and to thank him for his devotion to enhancing this project; in innumerable instances the present version reflects his corrections and suggestions for improvement. We are tremendously grateful for his investment of time, patience, attention to detail, insight, and of course, his erudition in developing the text to what you now see. Although our other reviewer’s initial comments were not as detailed, s/he, too, offered extremely useful criticism of our draft. For this reason, we sincerely thank these two reviewers for making this version as successful as it is. However, all remaining shortcomings must come to rest squarely on our shoulders.

But that is for the content. For the appearance of this fine edition, we express our most sincere gratitude to colleagues at the University of Washington Press: to executive editor Lorri Hagman, for her enthusiasm, her guidance, and her personal efforts to make it all turn out right; to assistant editor Neecole Bostick and the press’s editorial/design/production staff for their meticulous work on the illustrations; and to our patient copyeditor, Elizabeth Berg. Working with them, and with senior project editor Julie Van Pelt, has been efficient and enjoyable.