David Tod Roy

David Tod Roy (simplified Chinese: 芮效卫; traditional Chinese: 芮效衛; pinyin: Rui Xiaowei; 1933 – May 31, 2016) was an American sinologist and scholar of Chinese literature who was Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago from 1967 until he took early retirement in 1999. Roy is known for his translation of Jin Ping Mei (Chin P’ing Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase), published in five volumes by Princeton University Press 1993–2013, one of the Four Great Novels of the Ming dynasty. Where earlier translations omitted many passages, especially the sexual ones, Roy was the first to render the whole novel into English.

Roy's parents were Presbyterian missionaries to China, where his father, Andrew Tod Roy, taught at Nanking University. David and his younger brother, J. Stapleton Roy, were born in Nanjing. The Roys were on furlough in the United States when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, and when they returned to China, the family moved with the university to Chengdu, Sichuan. The brothers did not have formal schooling, but their father taught them poetry and were tutored in other subjects by faculty from local universities between 1939 and 1945.

After the war, Roy attended the Shanghai American School, but as the Communist Revolution came closer to power, other students withdrew until Roy was among only 16 students left. He took his final exam in tenth-grade geometry the day the communist army marched into the city. His parents were firm that their mission required them to communicate their faith in all circumstances and decided to stay on. Their mother arranged for the boys to be tutored in Chinese by a traditional scholar, Zhao Yanan, who had helped Pearl Buck to translate The Water Margin. The brothers developed their spoken Chinese as well. Roy later told an interviewer that he then made the "fatal mistake" or "wonderful choice" of asking Zhao to write the Chinese characters for his name; he stayed up half the night practicing it.

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