An Old Chinese Novel Is Racy Reading Still

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Mr. Roy

When David Tod Roy entered a used-book shop in the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1950, he was a 16-year-old American missionary kid looking for a dirty book.
His quarry was an unexpurgated copy of “The Plum in the Golden Vase” (金瓶梅 Jīn Píng Méi) an infamously pornographic tale of the rise and fall of a corrupt merchant, written by an anonymous author in the late 16th century.

A 17th-century illustration for the Ming dynasty novel "The Plum in the Golden Vase," newly translated, in five volumes with more than 4,400 endnotes, by David Tod Roy.

Mr. Roy had previously encountered only an incomplete English translation, which switched decorously into Latin when things got too raunchy. 

But there it was — an old Chinese edition of the whole thing — amid other morally and politically suspect items discarded by nervous owners after Mao Zedong’s takeover the previous year.
“As a teenage boy, I was excited by the prospect of reading something pornographic,” Mr. Roy, now 80 and an emeritus professor of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago, recalled recently by telephone. “But I found it fascinating in other ways as well.”
So have readers who have followed Mr. Roy’s nearly 40-year effort to bring the complete text into English, which has just reached its conclusion with the publication by Princeton University Press of the fifth and final volume, “The Dissolution.”
The novelist Stephen Marche, writing last month in The Los Angeles Review of Books, praised Mr. Roy’s masterly rendering of a richly encyclopedic novel of Ming dynasty manners, which Mr. Marche summed up, Hollywood-pitch style, as “Jane Austen meets hard-core pornography.” 

And Mr. Roy’s scholarly colleagues are no less awe-struck at his erudition, which seemingly leaves no literary allusion or cultural detail unannotated.
“He is someone who believes it’s his obligation to know absolutely everything about this book, even things that are only mentioned passingly,” said Wei Shang, a professor of Chinese literature at Columbia University. 

“It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to complete this kind of project.”
It also may take a certain stubbornness on the part of ordinary readers to make it all the way through this five-volume work, given its Proustian length (nearly 3,000 pages), DeMille-worthy cast (more than 800 named characters) and “Ulysses”-like level of quotidian detail — to say nothing of Mr. Roy’s 4,400-plus endnotes, whose range and precision would give one of Nabokov’s obsessive fictional scholars a run for his money.
They touch on subjects ranging from the novel’s often obscure literary references and suggested further reading on “the use of impatiens blossoms and garlic juice to dye women’s fingernails” to obscure Ming-era slang whose meaning, Mr. Roy notes with pride, had long eluded even native Chinese-speaking scholars.
“It’s not just a translation, it’s also a reference book,” said Yihong Zhang, a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh who is translating some of Mr. Roy’s notes into Chinese as part of his doctoral dissertation at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

“It opens a window onto Chinese literature and culture.”
And then there is the sex, which has fed fascination with the book, even though few people could actually read it.

In Mao’s China, access to the unexpurgated edition was restricted to government high officials (who were urged to study its depiction of imperial corruption) and select academics. 

Today, complete versions remain hard to find in China, though it is easily downloadable on Chinese Internet sites.
The level of raunch remains startling even to some Western literary scholars — particularly the infamous Chapter 27, in which the merchant, named Ximen Qing, puts his most depraved concubine to particularly prolonged and imaginative use.
“When I taught it, my students were flabbergasted, even though they knew about the novel’s reputation,” said Patricia Sieber, a professor of Chinese literature at Ohio State University. 

“S-and-M, the use of unusual objects as sex toys, excessive use of aphrodisiacs, sex under all kinds of nefarious circumstances — you name it, it’s all there.”
The novel’s sex has also inspired some modern reconsiderations. 

Amy Tan’s new novel, “The Valley of Amazement,” features a scene in which an aging courtesan in early-20th-century Shanghai is asked to re-enact a particularly degrading sex scene from this classic.
“I can’t say any of the characters are likable,” Ms. Tan said of the older novel. 

“But it’s a literary masterpiece.”
But the “Chin P’ing Mei,” as the novel is known in Chinese, is about far more than just sex, scholars hasten to add. 

It was the first long Chinese narrative to focus not on mythical heroes or military adventures, but on ordinary people and everyday life, chronicled down to the minutest details of food, clothing, household customs, medicine, games and funeral rites, with exact prices given for just about everything, including the favor of bribe-hungry officials up and down the hierarchy.
“It’s an extraordinarily detailed description of a morally derelict and corrupt society,” Mr. Roy said.
Mr. Roy dates the beginning of his work on the translation to the 1970s. 

By then, a revision of Clement Egerton’s 1939 English translation had put the Latinized dirty bits into English. 

But that edition still omitted the many quotations from earlier Chinese poetry and prose, along with, Mr. Roy said, much of the authentic flavor.
So he began copying every line borrowed from earlier Chinese literature onto notecards, which eventually numbered in the thousands, and reading every literary work known to have circulated in the late 16th century, to identify the allusions.
The first volume appeared in 1993 to rave reviews; the next came a long eight years later. 

Some colleagues urged him to go faster and scale back the notes. 

At one point, a Chinese website even reported that he had died amid his labors.
Just as Mr. Roy was completing the final volume, he received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which ruled out any prospect of preparing a condensed edition, as his Chicago colleague Anthony Yu did with his acclaimed translation of “Journey to the West,” another marathon-length Ming classic.
“I miss having something to concentrate on,” Mr. Roy said. 

“But unfortunately, I’m suffering from virtually constant fatigue.”
Scholars credit Mr. Roy (whose brother, J. Stapleton Roy, was United States ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995) with rescuing “The Plum in the Golden Vase” from its reputation in the West as merely exotic pornography and opening the door to a more political reading of the book.
It’s one that already comes easily to commentators in China, where the novel is seen as holding up a mirror to the tales of political and social corruption that fill newspapers now.
“You can find people like Ximen Qing easily today,” said Mr. Zhang in Pittsburgh. 

“Not just in China, but everywhere.”