Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for many years, and in the course of those years I have become indebted to a wide range of people and institutions for their help and encouragement. My doctoral dissertation was on Chinese fiction at the University of Chicago, but the long years before I finished work on that degree included a lot of Chinese language training, two years in Taiwan watching plays whenever I could and working at a Chinese opera school. The whole process was overseen by my main advisor, David T. Roy (1933–2016), who was always more interested in the late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei than most anything else, but will always be my North Star when it comes to scholarship and professional integrity.

I began teaching at the University of Michigan as a visiting lecturer even before I finished my degree, and was lucky enough to get a tenure-track position the next year. Over the decades both my department and the Center for Chinese Studies have been very generous in terms of financial support and the rich human resources of the Asian Studies community, including the graduate students, have always been important to my own growth.

The three institutions outside the University of Michigan that have kept me in contact with scholars of like interests located primarily in North America are the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the Association for Asian Performance (AAP), and The Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature (CHINOPERL). The annual meetings of these three organizations and especially being editor of the house journal of the last of the three have enabled me to come in close contact with a wide variety of scholars and scholarly approaches. I am particularly thankful for the chance to work with CHINOPERL’s wonderful editorial board.

I have been very lucky in my interactions with people in the world of Jingju in both Taiwan and China. I must admit that I did not manage, over the decades, to keep in contact with those I met in Taiwan in 1980–1982, with the sole exception of Tseng Yong-yih (Zeng Yongyi), with whom I took a class at Taiwan National University and have been fortunate enough to see again several times at academic conferences.

My first trip to China was for only a month, in 1982, too brief to get to know anyone as I ran from city to city with my wife to watch plays, but in 1986 we had the chance to live in China for almost a year, primarily in Nanjing. A young man came up to talk to me as I was waiting to go into a theater to see a performance in Nanjing and we became friends. His name was Wang Yuan and he was well connected and enjoyed introducing me to new people, face to face in Nanjing, and by letters that I took with me to Beijing and other places. It was through him that I met Wen Ruhua, who had become quite famous for performing a play that Weng Ouhong wrote for him that allowed him to show off both his skill at performing the young male roles that he, as a male, was officially allowed to perform, and young female roles that he had secretly learned from Zhang Junqiu (1920–1997). Wang Yuan, unfortunately, was dead from a sudden illness by the next time I got to go to China, but I get to see Ruhua and hear his thoughts on Jingju every time I go to Beijing.

It was in the late 1990s that I began to go to Beijing quite regularly at the end of most every school year. On one such trip, while I was watching the graduation plays of the students of Zhongguo Xiqu Xueyuan (Academy of Chinese Theater Arts), someone came and sat next to me, we began to talk, and quickly became friends. His name was Hai Zhen and he was the Chair of the Music Department of the Academy at the time (later he would become the Curator of the Library, a post from which he recently retired). He arranged for me to give the first of a series, over the years, of talks for the Academy, and to teach there for a semester. He is extremely curious and interested in learning new things. It was through Hai Zhen that I got to know Fu Jin, a professor at the Academy who has been at the very center of a multiyear program to turn the study of Jingju into a real academic discipline, both in terms of organizing bi-annual conferences on Jingju and overseeing the editing and publication of a wide range of resources critical to the study of Jingju.

Many people have read and commented on parts of this book and I am grateful to all of them, particularly to those who yelled at me. The colleague who put the most effort into trying to make its text readable and presentable, however, is Catherine Swatek, recently retired from the University of British Columbia. She is a repeat-offender, having also put a tremendous amount of effort into cleaning up the manuscript for my 1997 book. Being naturally thick-headed, I have not always accepted her good advice, for which she should not be blamed.

Last but not least, it is with great pleasure that I acknowledge the long-term and very patient support of my wife, Kathryn Rinehart, and two children, Benjamin and Elizabeth. I made sure to sneak all three of them into footnotes, since their experience as a co-conspirator (Kathryn), a jazz musician (Benjamin), and a choreographer (Elizabeth) have been great sources of inspiration for me.