The Roys were on furlough in the United States when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, and, when they returned to China, the family moved with the university to Chengdu, Sichuan.
[3] Their mother arranged for the boys to be tutored in Chinese by a traditional scholar, Zhao Yanan, who had helped Pearl S. Buck to translate The Water Margin.
Roy later told an interviewer that he then made the "fatal mistake" or "wonderful choice" of asking Zhao to write the Chinese characters for his name; he stayed up half the night practicing it.
He entered Friends' Central School there, although Derk Bodde, a sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, also accepted him into his graduate seminar in classical Chinese, where Roy was the only student.
He was assistant professor for several years at Princeton University, despite not yet having finished his doctoral thesis, a study of the modern Chinese poet and literary figure Guo Moruo.
Roy spent several years making an index for every line of poetry, proverb, or drama in the text, filling more than 10,000 three-by-five file cards.
He then set out to read all of the works that were in print before the novel was compiled; this index allowed him to identify a great number of the quotations and allusions that earlier scholars had not known.
Roy has made a "major contribution to our overall understanding of the novel by so structuring every single page of his translation that the numerous levels of the narration are clearly differentiated" and has annotated the text with a precision, thoroughness, and passion for detail that makes even a veteran reader of monographs smile with a kind of quiet disbelief".
The first airplane didn’t soar, either, but it’s very good that someone got a prototype off the ground.... What does it matter if the author of Chin P’ing Mei might be less than Flaubert?