At its best, copyediting can be like tackling a cleverly constructed crossword puzzle, a self-contained and satisfying task-not something I care to do full-time, but an entertaining diversion.

My true mission, however, was deeper and more subversive: to undermine cultural stereotypes by providing the English-reading world with an unmediated view of Chinese culture and society.īack then, I still was doing occasional copyediting in addition to acquiring books in Asian studies and various other fields. My purported task was to copyedit the 1,270 manuscript pages of the English translation of Stories Old and New, a set of forty vernacular short stories collected in the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) by the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular Chinese literature of his time, Feng Menglong.

This travel was, alas, only in the mind, but I relished it every day-an eight-hour minivacation in both space and time. But among the perks of my editorial job at the University of Washington Press in the summer of 1998 was being paid to boat down rivers and trek through mist-shrouded mountains in southeast China and to tiptoe into ancient monasteries and palaces, with eloquent and entertaining locals as my guides. Some people spend thousands of dollars and endure hours of exhausting air travel to vacation in exotic places. Stories Old and New: A Ming Dynasty Collection (ISBN: 9780295978444)

Ming feng