Dr. Charles Q. Wu, Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College, USA, was born and raised in Shanghai, China. He went to college at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute (now Beijing Foreign Studies University) in 1951 and graduated as an English major in 1954. He then took three years of graduate studies under the tutelage of Professors Shui Tiantong, Wang Zuoliang and Xu Guozhang. He joined the English faculty of his alma mater in 1957. He was for many years one of the chief editors of the nationwide English Language Learning magazine. From 1972 to 1977, he served on the editorial board of the Chinese-English Dictionary (1978). In 1980 he went to Columbia University for graduate studies in English literature and earned a Ph.D. in 1987. His doctoral dissertation was on a Daoist reading of the English romantic poet William Wordsworth. Dr. Wu then changed his interest from English literature to Chinese culture. He taught Chinese language, literature and civilization at Reed College from 1987 to 2002.