Roy spent several years making an index for every line of poetry, proverbs, or drama in the text, filling more than 10,000 three-by-five file cards. He and his students saw that the novel contained abundant but unidentified quotations from earlier works. Roy's graduate seminar on the novel took two years to read through the entire 3,000 pages of the earliest edition. In 1982 he began thirty years of work, finishing in 2012. The example of his colleague Anthony Yu, who did a complete translation of the later novel, Journey to the West, eventually inspired him. He initiated a graduate seminar on the novel without intending to do a translation. He recalled that as a teenage boy, he was attracted by its reputation of being pornographic but 'when I tried to read it I discovered there was much more to it than that.' He did not focus on the novel as a specialty, however, until he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1967. Roy's interest in Jin Ping Mei began when he was still in China. The thesis was the basis for his first book, Kuo Mo-Jo: The Early Years published by Harvard University Press in 1971. Professor Fairbank, at Princeton to give a talk, visited David in his office, spied the manuscript on his desk, took it in hand, and while leaving, congratulated David on having completed his Ph.D. He was assistant professor for several years at Princeton University, without, however, having finished his doctoral thesis, a study of the modern Chinese poet and literary figure, Guo Moruo. In 1958 he was made a member of Harvard's prestigious Society of Fellows.

He returned to Harvard to finish his undergraduate degree and went on to graduate work in Chinese studies. While in the Army he was stationed in Japan and Taiwan, where he improved his Chinese even further by deciphering the handwritten notes of his Chinese colleagues. He was asked to leave, then joined the United States Army during the Korean War. Roy entered but failed German, and did not attend other classes. Bodde recommended that Roy apply to Harvard, one of the few North American universities with a Chinese program.

He entered Friends' Central School there but 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. In the summer of 1950, Roy returned to the United States and lived with his Aunt, Jean Roy Robertson and Uncle outside Philadelphia, in Merion. 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. The brothers developed their spoken Chinese as well. Their mother arranged for the boys to be tutored in Chinese by a traditional scholar, Zhao Yanan, who had helped Pearl Buck to translate The Water Margin. His parents were firm that their mission required them to communicate their faith in all circumstances and decided to stay on.

He took his final exam in tenth-grade geometry the day the communist army marched into the city. ДЄfter the war, Roy attended the Shanghai American School, but as the Communist Revolution came closer to power, other students withdrew until Roy was among only 16 students left. The brothers did not have formal schooling, but their father taught them poetry and were tutored in other subjects by faculty from local universities between 19. 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. Roy's parents were Presbyterian missionaries to China, where his father, Andrew Tod Roy, taught at Nanking University. Where earlier translations omitted many passages, especially the sexual ones, Roy was the first to render the whole novel into English. It stands alongside the Four Great Novels of the Ming dynasty.

Roy is known for his translation of Jin Ping Mei ( Chin PвЂ™ing Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase), published in five volumes by Princeton University Press 1993вЂ“2013. David Tod Roy ( simplified Chinese: иЉ®ж•€еЌ« traditional Chinese: иЉ®ж•€иЎ› pinyin: RuГ¬ XiГ owГЁi 1933 вЂ“ May 31, 2016) was an American sinologist and scholar of Chinese literature who was Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago from 1967 until he took early retirement in 1999.

New jin ping mei 2013