Curled up in his German grandfather's library, the young Charles De Wolf looked up from the pages of Goethe to dream of the cobblestoned streets of Europe.
At the age of 15, he left his home in California to live a few years with relatives in Germany. "I never finished American high school — I went straight from a German high school to the University of California at Berkeley in the wild days of the '60s," De Wolf recalls. "I went back to Europe as a university exchange student in my junior year and improved my French."
Fluent in both languages, a Latinist with a rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Italian and admittedly Eurocentric, De Wolf decided to learn Spanish by joining the Peace Corps after he graduated with a degree in comparative literature. Despite his hope to be sent to Latin America, De Wolf's life instead forever veered to Asia.