Wu Ningkun

Wu Ningkun (; September 1920 – August 10, 2019) was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of International Relations in Beijing, where he had taught since 1956. During the 1980s, he held Visiting Fellowships at Cambridge University, Northwestern University and the University of California. In 1990, he was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters from Manchester University, Indiana. In 1992, he was Mansfield Visiting professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Montana. He has frequently lectured at Cambridge, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard and other universities. His publications include the memoir, A Single Tear - A Family's Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China, written in collaboration with his wife, Li Yikai ; scholarly essays in English and Chinese; and translations from English into Chinese and vice versa, among them a translation of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, but resigned in 2006.

Biography Wu Ningkun was born on August 14, 1920 (lunar calendar), Yangzhou, Jiangsu, China. In 1939, at the end of his sophomore year at the National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming, he volunteered for the Chinese National Revolutionary Army as interpreter for the American Flying Tigers. After the Second World War, in 1946, he took up his study of English literature again at Manchester University (Indiana) and the University of Chicago. In 1951, while working on a dissertation about T. S. Eliot, he was invited to return to China and accept an academic position at Yenching University, Beijing, replacing an American professor who was forced to depart due to the Korean War. He decided to interrupt his doctoral studies and accept the invitation: "The lure of a meaningful life in a brave new world outweighed the attraction of a doctorate and an academic future in an alien land." In his memoir he recounts an anecdote about T. D. Lee, one of the fellow graduate students who had come to see him off for his journey: "Why aren't you coming home to serve the new China, T. D.?" He answered with a knowing smile, "I don't want to have my brains washed by others." As I didn't know how brains could be washed, I did not at the time find the idea very daunting.