Susan Chan Egan is an independent scholar. She is the author of, among other books, A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893-1980) (1987), coauthor of A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit: The Half-Century Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams (2009), and cotranslator of Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (Columbia, 2008).
Pai Hsien-yung (Bai Xianyong) is an acclaimed fiction writer and a professor emeritus of East Asian languages and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Taipei People and Crystal Boys. He has taught The Story of the Stone for decades and is the author of a popular three-volume guide in Chinese on which this book is based.