Acknowledgments

The gemination of the idea for a collection of authentic materials for teaching Chinese goes back at least three decades. In the early 1990s, I was part of a group in Southern California thinking about developing alternative teaching materials. One of the ideas was a set of authentic materials we jokingly referred to as 百宝箱 ‘treasure box.’ The current book may not have lived up to what was envisioned, but I wish to thank my like-minded colleagues for sharing the desire for authentic materials.

I wish to thank my departmental colleagues Professors Eniko Csomay and Rob Malouf, who first inspired me to investigate stylistic variation using corpora.

Thanks go my San Diego State University students of my 2011 experimental course entitled ‘Variety of Authentic Written Chinese,’ where I first implemented my research on style in Chinese. Thanks also go to the cadets in a similar class at the US Air Force Academy, where I taught from 2017 to 2019.

Lastly, I am grateful to my wife Xi and daughter Natalie for their steadfast support, and for tolerating my long absence when I went away first to the US Air Force Academy and then to Kyrgyzstan as a Fulbright scholar. They also provided the initial impetus for a sign-collecting trip to Shanghai in the winter of 2019, when the majority of the pictures were taken.