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ix Acknowledgments This book would not have been completed without the inspiration and continuous encouragement of Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee. His work on cultural appropriation in modern Shanghai inspired me to think in broader terms, namely, about the overall relationships among cultural borrowing, urban history, modernity, and colonialism in the Chinese context. His focus on creating a bridge between area and ethnic studies, between the discourse of multiculturalism in the United States and the concerns with heterogeneity and democracy in the Chinese context moved me to think beyond the conceptual and geographic borders of the nation-state. Over the years, Professor Lee showed his interest in my intellectual development in his characteristically subtle and warm-hearted manner. He encouraged me and provided me with many opportunities to exchange ideas with other scholars at conferences and graduate seminars.Without his recognition, encouragement, and guidance, I would not have been able to finish this book. I have also had many senior colleagues, peers, and friends who accompanied me through what sometimes felt like an endless journey of writing. Members of the Asian American Women’s Writing Group, Lok Siu, Sandhya Shukla, Evelyn Ch’ien, and Mary Lui embraced this not-so-typical Asian American studies project with an open heart and pushed me to think critically about issues of transnationalism and migration. My good friend and historian Mae Ngai involved me in a translation workshop at the University of Chicago, which gave me an opportunity to share a portion of this book with colleagues from other disciplines. My colleagues at the English Department of Rutgers University, David Eng, Edlie Wong, Sonali Perera, Chris Chism, Brent Edwards, Mary Sheridan-Rabideau, María Josefina SaldañaPortillo , and John McClure, read different portions of this book at various stages of completion and gave me a great deal of constructive criticism. My good friend and colleague David Eng, in particular, set up a very useful workshop for junior Asian American scholars, which allowed me to share my work with colleagues with similar research interests. Shu-mei Shih, Dorothy Wong, David Eng, and Sonali Perera read the entire manuscript at its last stage of completion on short notice and left me with many challenging questions to consider with regard to some key arguments. I was deeply touched by their attentiveness, professionalism, and spirit of camaraderie throughout the whole process, and the manuscript has been greatly improved because of their constructive criticism. I would not have been able to acquire the necessary broad knowledge base to finish this project of an interdisciplinary nature without the continuous support of mentors and friends in East Asian studies. Professor David Der-wei Wang took time out of his busy schedule to discuss with me the project’s conceptual framework—sometimes between stops on his lecture tours of various universities. His questions and suggestions urged me to situate this focused study more firmly in the broad historical context of traveling cultures in late Qing and Republican China. The organizer of the Modern China Seminar series at Columbia University Eugenia Lean provided me with an opportunity to present a portion of this work at a faculty seminar, where Adam McKeown, Dorothy Ko, Eugenia Lean, and Rebecca Karl, among others, gave me some valuable feedback. I have fond memories of conversations with Ted Huters over delicious spicy food and beer in a small Szechuan restaurant in Beijing. He later sent me a manuscript of his own single-case study of the usage of English in modern Chinese intellectual discourses, which was for me further proof of the importance of the subject matter of my own project. In addition, my good friend Zhang Zhen supported me spiritually and emotionally by sharing with me her own experience of living and working in a cross-cultural context. Shu-mei Shih has also been extremely helpful and generous in guiding me along the path of intellectual development. Friends and colleagues in Asia, including Leung Ping-kwan of Lingnan University and Lam To-kwan of Oxford University Press in Hong Kong, guided me through the labyrinths of archival and social networks in Hong Kong, which enabled me to have a clearer picture of the activities of some of the migrant writers in the Hong Kong phase of their lives. This book received a generous grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, which provided some much-needed relief from the financial stress of academic publishing today. Finally, my sincere thanks to my editors Leslie Mitchner...

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