Jo Wang, 葉松君, passed away on June 24, 2024, in Brooklyn, NY. The cause of death was lymphoma. She was 86.

Jo was born in Kunming, Yunnan, China and was raised in Shanghai and other cities amidst the backdrop of World War II and the Japanese occupation of China. Her birth mother worked in national intelligence and would later become the first female general in Taiwan. In 1949, Jo's family fled to Taiwan following the Nationalist goverment’s defeat in the Chinese civil war.

Jo was an excellent student who excelled in writing and calligraphy. She often won essay contests and would use her prize money to treat her younger siblings to candy and movies. She went on to study at National Taiwan University, where she was at the top of her class for all four years.

She left Taiwan for the U.S. to study library science at Vanderbilt University. After graduating, she worked at the Yale University Medical Library, where she met a dashing physics graduate student, Y.K. Wang (汪元康). They married and had two sons, Han and Gary, whom they raised in Massachusetts and California.

Jo's career as a librarian spanned many states. After Jo and Y.K. moved to California in 1999, she worked at Stanford University until her retirement. Jo’s intellect and soft spoken demeanor garnered deep respect among her peers, and to friends, she was affectionately known as Yezi (葉子), a playful likening to the great Confucian scholars Kongzi and Mengzi.

Jo loved the arts. Danish furniture, Marimekko prints, birding, gardening, modern art, classical music, and Paul Simon were among her passions. She was an avid reader who loved Rilke and Louise Glück. She enjoyed learning languages, and spent many years studying German and in more recent years, Arabic.

Jo possessed the soul of an artist, with a strong independent streak and a keen eye for aesthetics. Throughout her life, regardless of how busy she might have been working full time and raising a family, she always had a creative project in the works, whether it was knitting stuffed animals for a charity or creating the numerous intricate textile pieces that hung on her walls. Over the years, she knitted many smiley cats as gifts to babies to welcome them into the world.

She is survived by her two sons and two grandsons in Brooklyn, two sisters in Taipei, and a brother in Shanghai. 

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