Kao was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States to parents who were studying as Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship Program students and moved with them to China at age three, living in Nanjing, Beijing, and Shanghai.

There he edited a daily news bulletin called The Voice of China based on radio reports from Chongqing, the Republic's capital during World War II.

[3] From 1947–49, he worked for China's newly formed Government Information Office as director of the West Coast office and, later, as editor-in-chief of The Chinese Press (華美周報 Huá-Měi Zhōubào).From 1951–53, Kao was a Chinese-language Instructor at the United States Department of Defense's Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

In 1957, he became chief editor for the Washington, D.C. Voice of America's radio Chinese Broadcast, and later deputy director of the China Branch, and resided in nearby Kensington, Maryland.

He is known in the Chinese world as the translator of several classics of English-language literature and as the author of several books on the English language and about the United States.

Among his literary translations are F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.