Not long before his recent untimely death at age 55 from cancer, Xiaojia Ge, a Professor in the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, edited a special issue of Acta Psychologica Sinica that would introduce behavioral genetics in depth to a Chinese audience of scientist-scholars. He commissioned nine articles from his colleagues in the U.S.A., U.K., Sweden, and Finland, research that sampled normal and abnormal behaviors and contemporary behavioral genetic methodologies. We (Irving I. Gottesman, Sheng He, Leslie D. Leve, and Jenae M. Neiderhiser) facilitated a selection of three of those pieces, and negotiated with John Hewitt, Editor of Behavior Genetics, to reproduce them here in a Special Section as a memorial to the good offices of Xiaojia Ge as the major ambassador between Chinese and American hopes for internationalization and future collaborations in our field of interest. All nine papers can be accessed at http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xuebao/en/dqml.asp for the October, 2008 issue. Xiaojia Ge was born in Beijing on October 24, 1954. He was the third of three children in his sibship. At the time of his birth his father, Yaochang Ge, was a clerk working for the Chinese Customs Service; his mother, Zhengjing Chen, was a teacher at a local junior high school. In 1960, as a result of political persecution, his family was forced to move to a remote rural County, Kaili, in Guizhou Province in southern China. There, Xiaojia Ge had only 6 years of grade school education. The Great Cultural Revolution in China came in 1966, decimating Chinese culture, intellectual and family life, and science. For the next few years, Xiaojia’s education was curtailed, and at times he took up long-distance running and soccer in a local sports school for youth and on a provincial soccer team. In 1970, to help ease the hardship suffered by his family, he took a job as a coal miner at the Tongzi Coal Mine in Guizhou. He returned 3 years later from the coalmine and took a job as a machinist in an agricultural equipment factory. His life took a turn for the better in 1977 when China restored the College Entrance Examination for the first time since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In a very short time Xiaojia Ge prepared for the entrance exam and made up much of the missing high school course work on his own. With high scores Xiaojia entered Sichuan University to study history. In 1982 he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese History and World History. He entered Xiamen University to study Transportation and I. I. Gottesman (&) S. He University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA e-mail: Gotte003@UMN.edu