Helen Foster Snow
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Helen Foster Snow (1907-1997) is an American journalist who reported from China in the 1930s under the name "Nym Wales" on the developing revolution in China and the Korean independence movement. She, like her husband, Edgar Snow, was sympathetic to the revolutionaries in China, whom she compared unfavorably to the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. In the 1940s, critics of American policy grouped her with the China Hands as one of those who went beyond sympathy to active support.
Helen Foster was born in Cedar City, Utah and raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from which she later became disaffected. After attending the University of Utah for a short time, her father, an influential Utah attorney, arranged a job for her in the American Consulate in Shanghai. Almost immediately after arriving in 1931, she met Edgar Snow, who had arrived in China in 1929. They married in 1932. At a time when many Chinese were impatient with the Nationalist government for not opposing Japanese more actively, he couple moved to Beiping, as Peking was then called, and took up residence in a small house near Yenching University, where they both taught. They were just in time to report on the 1935 anti-Japanese December 9th Movement. The Snows got to know idealistic and patriotic students, a number of whom were in their journalism classes, and some of whom were members of the Communist underground. Helen struck those who met her at this time as excitable and "talking like a machine gun." She urged one of the leaders to give laggard students "the devil for their inactivity and sleepiness," and asked "why be a vegetable?" [1]
Edgar Snow was the first to go to the "Red Areas" and came back with the material for his Red Star Over China. "Peg," as she was known to her friends, was not to be outdone, and soon followed, returning with the material for her book Inside Red China (Doubleday, 1939) and the later Red Dust (Stanford University Press, 1952). She also drew upon her interviews with a Korean independence leader she met in Yan'an, which she used to write the book The Song of Ariran. The couple joined anti-Japanese friends, such as Ida Pruitt, Israel Epstein,and Rewi Alley in organizing Chinese Industrial Cooperatives Gung Ho industrial worker's cooperatives) after 1937.
The couple's marriage was strained and the Japanese occupation of much of China made life difficult. Helen returned to the States in 1940. The couple formally divorced in 1949. She spent the rest of her life in Connecticut, developing an interest in family genealogy, drafting a novel, and writing short pieces on her experiences in China. She published her autobiography in 1984.
After her death in 1997, Helen's family donated her manuscripts, documents and photographs to the Brigham Young University library.[1] On October 26-27, 2000, BYU held a Helen Foster Snow Symposium to celebrate this donation and gather scholars.
[edit] Writings and References
Helen Foster Snow, My China Years: A Memoir (New York: Morrow, 1984).
Kelly Ann Long, Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006). ISBN 0-87081-847-3.
S. Bernard Thomas, Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
"Helen Foster Snow: Witness to Revolution" (2000) 56:46 minute documentary produced by Combat Films and Research.
[edit] References
- ^ Thomas, Season of High Adventure pp. 119- 125.
