Translators’ Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the entire team at Yale University Press, including Abbie Storch, Kristy Leonard, and Danielle D’Orlando for their organizational skills, and Robert Pranzatelli, Erika Lake-Thomas, and Stephanie Lee for their promotion of Can Xue’s work. We are delighted with Jenny Volvovski’s evocative jacket design. Special thanks go to Susan Laity, senior editor, for her enthusiasm for Can Xue’s writing and for her meticulous attention to detail; and to John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, for his vision and for his long-standing commitment to Can Xue’s works. Finally, we thank Can Xue for challenging her readers with her spontaneity and creativity and for once again inviting us to render her work in English.

CAN XUE, pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, has written many novels, volumes of literary criticism and philosophy, and short works of fiction. Barefoot Doctor is her twelfth book to appear in English. I Live in the Slums (2020) was long-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Translation Award for Prose. Five Spice Street (2009) was a finalist for the Neustadt Prize. The Last Lover (2014) won the Best Translated Book Award for Fiction. Frontier (2017) made the 2017 “Best of” lists of NPR, the Boston Globe, and World Literature Today. Love in the New Millennium (2018) was long-listed for the 2019 International Booker Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. In 2001, Can Xue moved to Beijing from Changsha, Hunan. She has recently moved to Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, where she continues writing and jogging every day. When she was young, she served as a barefoot doctor for a time.

KAREN GERNANT and CHEN ZEPING have translated six previous books by Can Xue; this is the seventh. It follows Blue Light in the Sky (2006), Five Spice Street, Vertical Motion (2011), Frontier, I Live in the Slums, and Purple Perilla (2020). Gernant, professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University, and Chen, professor emeritus of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, have translated contemporary Chinese fiction for more than twenty years. In addition to their work with Can Xue, they have published a collection of stories by Zhang Kangkang (2011), a volume of stories by Alai (2012), two novellas by Zhang Yihe (2017), and The Zither, a collection of short fiction and a novella (2021). They have also published numerous short story translations in various literary magazines.