Virginia Dzung Weng

Virginia Dzung Weng, a writer-editor-translator who was fluent in both Chinese and English and active in educational and documentary film production, died on February 27, 2003. She was 83 and lived in Lyme, New Hampshire.

She was born in Washington, D.C. on January 16, 1920, to Mr. Kenyon Vallee Dzung and Nyui Sung Dau, when Mr. Dzung just joined the Chinese Legation at the invitation of Dr. Wellington Koo. At the beginning of 1922, her family returned to China via London, England. She attended a number of schools in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Peking (Beijing) as her father changed his governmental posts. In 1933, she attended the Peking American School and, because of Japanese invasion and occupation of North China, she completed her high school credits in Shanghai’s St. John’s University and earned a complete scholarship in Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 1939. She switched from chemistry to English literature and graduated magna cum laude in 1943. Given a fellowship at Harmon Foundation, New York, to study film making, she was assigned to do research and script writing on a documentary film about Chinese students in the United States from late Qing dynasty to World War II. That was when she met Wan-go H.C. Weng, the producer-director of that film. They married on April 29, 1944 and collaborated on production of documentaries in English, translation of American feature films into Chinese versions, writing books and essays on Chinese art and history, and many other cultural and commercial projects throughout her life. She co-authored The Magic Boat and Other Chinese Folk Stories with M.A. Jagendorf in 1980 with illustrations by her husband.

A critical time in the life of her family was the return to China in 1948. Japan surrendered in 1945 but her husband’s business affairs detained him in the United States. She decided to bring the 3-year old daughter Ssu to visit her parents and in-laws in her home country by train from New York to San Francisco and by boat across the Pacific to Shanghai in the spring. Her husband followed in the summer. By that time the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army and the Communist forces reached the decisive stage of Battle for Manchuria; by August, the Nationalist was routed and the fate of North China hung in balance. Her family of three left Beijing for Tianjin where Wan-go’s parents lived, and they packed their inherited ancient books, painting and calligraphy and went to Shanghai. Towards the end of November, they took the last flight of Northwest Airlines and returned to New York City. Thirty-one years passed before they could see China and their relatives and friends again.

The nuclear team of two traveled extensively in film work: location photography and research took them to major cities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as New Dehli, Leningrad, Singapore during the 50’s to 70’s. They lived in New York City for about 40 years; in 1977, they decided to move to Lyme, New Hampshire, retiring from film making and concentrating in writing and publishing. After the normalization of relationship between the United States and China in 1979, they returned to their homeland more than twenty times, visiting major museums and archeological sites from Northeast to Xinjiang (Sinkiang), from Sichuan to Guangdong. Her linguistic ability - French, German and various dialects in China, her organizing skills and her uncanny judgment of people proved invaluable in travel and negotiation during a lifetime of close teamwork with her husband.

Mrs. Weng was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, New York City, a Fellow in Perpetuity of Metropolitan Museum of Art, a member of the Utility Club in Lyme, New Hampshire and Bryn Mawr Club in New England.

Virginia Dzung Weng is survived by her husband, Wan-go H.C.Weng, their daughter, Dr. Ssu Isabel Weng of Santa Fe, New Mexico and their son, I-Hsueh Hugo Weng of Los Angeles, California, Ssu’s two sons, Andrea and Aly Pesic. The funeral will not be public. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested donations to the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, 1 Medical Center Drive, Lebanon, NH 03756, or to the China Institute in America, 125 East 65th Street, New York, NY 10021.