Siu Gan (S. G.) Tsao was born into an official family in Changsha, Hunan in 1901 and graduated high school from Yale-in-China 雅禮. He arrived in the U.S. in July 1919 to attend Grinnell College as a freshman. In January 1920 he was living in Claremont, CA according to the 1920 US census, possibly attending Claremont High School and Pomona College, according to a family member (“Liu Zhixun”). A Grinnell alumni card lists his enrollment period at Grinnell as from February to June 1920. He then attended Oberlin from 1920-1921, the University of Illinois in Urbana in July 1921 (DI 07/20/1921) and reportedly the University of Michigan as well (“Liu Zhixun”). But he returned to China in 1922 due to a lack of funds. He came back to the U.S. again in 1926, via Vancouver and Seattle, and attended Grinnell College as a sophomore in 1926-1927. He was listed as member of the Cosmopolitan Club at Grinnell from 1927-1931 (Cromwell 16), though we have no other records of his matriculation at Grinnell for the last period nor is it known when he returned to China a second time.  

According to a family member, Tsao taught English at Hunan University in the 1940s. He studied at the Chinese Communist-run North China People’s Revolution University 華北人民革命大學, a forerunner of Renmin University of China (RUC), in Beijing in 1950-1952, which might have equipped him to teach Russian at a middle school in Hunan from 1952-1958. From 1959-1962 he worked at the library of Hunan Normal University. From 1962-1996 he worked for the Hunan Culture and History Museum. Tsao passed away in Changsha, Hunan, China in 1996 (“Liu Zhixun”).