❀ ❀ ❀Acknowledgments
How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology was generously funded by the Cen-
ter for East Asian and Pacific Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages
and Cultures, and the Research Board of the University of Illinois.
In addition to acknowledging the financial support of these institutions, I wish
to express my gratitude to my colleagues, my students, and the staff at the Uni-
versity of Illinois. In particular, I wish to thank Professor George T. Yu, former di-
rector of the center, for his valuable guidance and support. My special thanks also
go to my friends Leon Chai and Cara Ryan for their illuminating comments on
some parts of the manuscript, to Jerome Packard and Chilin Shih for their advice
on issues of linguistics and sound recording, to Li Tonglu, Li Liyu, and Cui Jie for
producing the sound recording, and again to Cui Jie for her meticulous editorial
assistance. I would like to thank Professor William H. Baxter of the University of
Michigan and Professor David Branner of the University of Maryland for provid-
ing advice and assistance with the phonetic transcriptions of entering-tone char-
acters. The project has also benefited from the valuable participation and support
of Professor Dore J. Levy of Brown University, Professor John Timothy Wixted of
Arizona State University, and other outside scholars at its different stages.
The contributors to this volume wish to thank three anonymous readers for
their insightful comments and suggestions. We are deeply indebted to Jennifer
Crewe, associate director and editorial director of Columbia University Press,
for her enthusiastic support and professional guidance. We are also very grateful
to Irene Pavitt for overseeing the production process and to Mike Ashby for his
meticulous copyediting.
Finally, I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to my wife, Jing Liao, for encour-
aging me to continue the project despite our extreme difficulties in the months
before the conference, and to my daughter, Serena, for countless evenings and
weekends devoted to the project instead of her.
Chapter 2 includes excerpts from “On Encountering Trouble,” in The Songs of
the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets, ed.
and trans. David Hawkes (New York: Penguin, 1985). Chapters 5, 12, and 13 con-
tain material from Zong-qi Cai, The Matrix of Lyric Transformation: Poetic Modes
and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry (Ann Arbor: Center for
Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996); Maija Samei, Gendered Persona
and Poetic Voice: The Abandoned Woman in Early Chinese Song Lyrics (Lanham, Md.:
Lexington Books, 2004); and Xinda Lian, The Wild and Arrogant: Expression of Self
in Xin Qiji’s Song Lyrics (New York: Lang, 1999), respectively. We are grateful to the
editors and publishers for their permission to reprint from those works.