| Birth Date: | 1891 |
| Death Date: | 2001 |
| Nationality: | Chinese-American |
| Occupation: | literary scholar, translator, professor |
| Education: | University of Wisconsin Columbia University |
| Workplaces: | University of Wisconsin—Madison Columbia University Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| Notable Students: | Burton Watson |
Chi-chen Wang (; 1899–2001) was a Chinese-born American literary scholar and translator. He taught as a professor at Columbia University from 1929 until his retirement in 1965.
Wang was born in Huantai County, Shandong province. His father Wang Caiting (; 1877–1952) achieved the Jinshi degree, the highest level of the civil service examinations and was a county magistrate in Guangdong, where Chi-chen lived for several years.
Chi-chen studied the Confucian classics at home, then entered the middle school affiliated with Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1913. Upon graduation he proceeded to the United States on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program scholarship. In 1922-1924 he studied at the University of Wisconsin and earned an A.B. in Economics. In 1924-1927 he attended Columbia University's business and journalism schools and the Graduate Faculties of Political Science, Philosophy and Pure Science. Wang did not study for a higher degree perhaps because, as he later wrote, he was not a "good student". He confessed he was more interested in pursuing girls (although back in Shandong he had a wife by arranged marriage who later bore him a son).
While in the United States, he came in conflict with American missionaries and the values of what he called western "enterprise, pugnacity, and dead-in-earnestness". He argued that Chinese religion was non-sectarian and pragmatic, and that the "practical common sense of the Chinese" makes the task of saving "the Heathen Chinee" difficult, even more so by the "growing sense of nationalism" after the "farcical Treaty of Versailles".
Wang joined the Columbia faculty in 1929 was also a research assistant at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1928-1936. and was among the few Chinese scholars employed at American universities in 1928. He returned to China in 1929 and 1935 to visit his family, which then lived in Shandong. On his 1929 visit, the poet Xu Zhimo introduced him to Shen Congwen, a highly regarded novelist and short-story writer. Wang and Shen corresponded regularly in the following years.
Wang was in the group that expanded the Columbia Asian studies faculty in the 1930s, in which Wang taught classical language and literature. Wm Theodore de Bary's history of the program notes that
As a liberated child of the Revolution and alienated from much of traditional culture, he tended to be somewhat cynical and less than inspiring as a lecturer. His forte was as a translator of modern literature, and though allergic to all talk of grammar, he would spend long hours in virtually tutorial sessions with those determined enough to benefit from his fine command of both Chinese and English.[1]
Wang expected his students to not only be competent in reading Chinese but fluent and idiomatic English, particularly if they were native speakers. One of his students, Burton Watson, who would become an eminent translator, recalled taking an advanced course with Wang in 1950 reading two essays from the Shiji in classical Chinese. He later wrote that he remembered Professor Wang's "frequent exasperated outbursts,'You mean you don't even know that character?" or 'What kind of English is that!'" Watson continued that the hours spent with him that year "left me with the conviction that in translating such texts, it is not enough merely to bring across the meaning of the Chinese; one must do so in a manner that reads like natural idiomatic English. This conviction has remained with me through the years and informed all my work as a translator of Chinese and Japanese."
Another Columbia student who went on to a successful academic career, Harriet Mills, remarked that Wang Chi-chen's translations were what first interested her in Lu Xun. Wang resigned from her dissertation committee, however, leaving Mills with the impression that he feared he would be in danger of McCarthyite reprisals (Mills argued that Lu Xun sincerely supported the Communists, a controversial position during the Cold War).[2]
Through his friend, C.T. Hsia, Wang began a correspondence with Chen Jo-hsi, a Taiwan author who was living in Vancouver. She had gone from Taiwan to live on the Chinese mainland during the Cultural Revolution and wrote stories frankly describing life there. After they met, Chen said they became "friends across the generation gap". Wang translated several of her stories and gave her advice that she used in revising her book, Execution of Mayor Yin (1978) [3]
When he retired, Wang recommended that C.T. Hsia succeed him.
Wang was married twice, first to Bliss Kao, and then to Yang Dalai, until his death in 2001.
The Hong Kong scholar Wang Baorong called Wang "the most successful Lu Xun translator in the early years" and writes that Wang made "American-English versions of sixteen pieces which are accurate and refined."