Sidney Shapiro, a famed U.S.-born translator who was one of the few Westerners to gain Chinese citizenship and become a member of a high-level parliamentary body, died over the weekend in Beijing, his granddaughter said. He was 98.

Shapiro was born in New York in 1915 and first came to China in 1947, having been selected by the U.S. army to learn Chinese during World War II.

He married a Chinese actress who was a supporter of the Communist Party, which at the time was fighting a civil war with the Nationalists, and did not visit the United States again until 1971.