Ruth F. Weiss (1908–2006)

Ruth F. Weiss was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. She graduated from the University of Vienna with a degree in German and English studies. In 1933, she traveled to Shanghai, China, a city that was attracting many European émigrés at the time, including veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jews, and other refugees from the Nazis. She had told her parents she intended to stay only six months, but decided to remain longer and work as a freelance journalist. When news of her parents’ death in the Holocaust, apparently in 1939, reached her, she decided to make China her permanent home. Later she became a teacher at the Jewish School in Shanghai, at the School of the Chinese Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, and at the West China Union University. In 1943, she married Yeh Hsuan, an engineer, with whom she had two children. They went to the USA in 1946 so he could study at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She worked in the Radio Division of the United Nations in New York City. After the Communist Revolution and the creation of the People's Republic of China, Weiss returned with her children in 1951; Yeh chose to remain in the USA. Weiss worked as a lecturer for the Publishing House for Foreign Literature in Beijing from 1952 to 1965. She also worked as a journalist for China Pictorial.  Weiss took the Chinese name Wei Lushi, and was one of about 100 foreign-born residents to receive Chinese citizenship in 1955. In 1983, after being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, she was back in favor and was named one of 11 foreign experts by the Communist Party. She published several books, including an English-language biography of Chinese novelist Lu Xun, and a German-language autobiography of her own, Am Rande der Geschichte: Mein Leben in China (At the Edge of History: My Life in China, 1999).