 When his father died in 1926, he and his mother stayed in Fenzhou until he moved to Oberlin, Ohio for his high school education.Pye lost much of his grasp of the Chinese language upon moving to Ohio, only to take it up again later.Pye graduated in 1943 from Carleton College, where he met Mary Toombs Waddill, of Greenville, South Carolina; they married in 1945, and she would co-write and help edit many of his books and writings over the years.