Wang Chi-chen

Chi-chen Wang (王際真 Wang Jizhen) (1899-2001) was a Chinese-born American literary scholar and translator. He taught as a professor at Columbia University from 1929 until his retirement in 1965.

He was known for his translations of traditional and modern Chinese literature, especially his two adapted translations of Dream of the Red Chamber in 1929 and 1958. He made pioneering translation-anthologies of traditional fiction and modern short fiction that introduced such writers as Lu Xun, China's leading 20th century author, and Shen Congwen, and in later years Chen Jo-hsi, a Taiwan author.

Wang was born in Huantai County, Shandong province. His father Wang Caiting 王寀廷 (1877-1952) achieved the Jinshi degree, the highest level of the civil service examinations and was a county magistrate in Guangdong, where Chi-chen lived for several years.

Chi-chen studied the Confucian classics at home, then entered the middle school affiliated with Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1913. Upon graduation he proceeded to the United States on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program scholarship. In 1922-1924 he studied at the University of Wisconsin and earned an A.B. in Economics. In 1924-1927 he attended Columbia University’s business and journalism schools and the Graduate Faculties of Political Science, Philosophy and Pure Science. Wang did not study for a higher degree perhaps because, as he later wrote, he was not a “good student”. He confessed he was more interested in pursuing girls (although back in Shandong he had a wife by arranged marriage who later bore him a son).

While in the United States, he came in conflict with American missionaries and the values of what he called western "enterprise, pugnacity, and dead-in-earnestness". He argued that Chinese religion was non-sectarian and pragmatic, and that the "practical common sense of the Chinese" makes the task of saving "the Heathen Chinee" difficult, even more so by the "growing sense of nationalism" after the "farcical Treaty of Versailles".

...
Wikipedia