Charles Wu

Charles Wu

Charles Q. Wu is Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College, where he taught from 1988-2002. Dr. Wu was born in raised in Shanghai, China, and studied and taught at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute.  He left China in 1980 to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University in English literature with a specialty in romantic English poetry.  His dissertation explored a Taoist reading of William Wordsworth.

As an intellectual in Maoist China, Charles Wu was placed under solitary confinement. While there, Professor Wu wondered to himself, “Maybe it was people like us [Mao] had in mind to clean up all that was considered old and reactionary.” Those thoughts led Professor Wu to think of Shakespeare’s   Sonnet 29, which he transcribed in English in his diary. Here, Professor Wu reads Sonnet 29.

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