自強之路

Paid Notice: Deaths
WU, PEI, YI
Published: April 19, 2009, NYT
WU--Pei-Yi, a specialist in the study of premodern Chinese culture and literature, died on April 6th, at the age of 81. Long affiliated with Queens College and Columbia University, Wu was the author of The Confucian's Progress, a book on the origins and history of autobiography in China. Professor Wu was born in Nanking in 1927, the son of Ou Tsin-Chen, Vice-Minister of Education in the Nationalist government and Ni Lian, Professor of Psychology and Statistics at National Taiwan University. After receiving an undergraduate degree in Foreign Literature from Nanking University in 1948, he emigrated to the United States where he received various degrees. Among them were an MA in Mathematics and a doctorate in East Asian Languages and Culture. Both these degrees were from Columbia. In 1967 Professor Wu became a full time member of the Queens College faculty, retiring in 1996 with the rank of full professor. During the last thirty years of his life, Pei-Yi Wu was an adjunct professor at Columbia University. His signature course was Directed Readings. It examined classical and modern Chinese texts. He gained recognition for his work on Confucian guilt, self-examination, autobiography, the history of childhood, Chinese women warriors and the literature of pilgrimage. The work on autobiography culminated in The Confucian's Progress (Princeton, 1990). To quote, Philip Kuhn, a close friend, "PY's diverse circle of friends will continue to revere his invincible skepticism, his inter-cultural curiosity and his belief that the human condition is grave but not serious". Pei-Yi Wu is survived by his sisters, Helen Pei-Ping Chang and Pei-Ching Chen, his nephews, Julius Chang and Raymond Chen, and his long time companion, Mary Jo Robertiello.