(During the 1930s, Helen Snow lived the glomorous and dang...)
During the 1930s, Helen Snow lived the glomorous and dangerous life of a journalist in China, eventually publishing seven books on the Communist accession with her husband Edgar. Inside Red China is her firsthand account of the cataclymic events from May to September, 1937 in the Soviet capital Yenan just before the Red Army joined Chiang Kai-shek to defeat the Japanese.
Helen Foster Snow was an American Social reformer, author and journalist, who helped bring social change to China in the 1930's, witnessed revolution and war and throughout wrote to promote American-Chinese understanding. Helen Foster Snow wrote under the pen name Nym Wales, which her husband chose for her.
Background
Helen Foster Snow was born on September 21, 1907, in Cedar, Utah, United States. She was the daughter of John Moody and Hanna (Davis) Foster. Snow's family moved often throughout her youth and she ended up living in Salt Lake City with her grandmother in her teenage years until she decided to move to China in 1931.
Being the oldest child and only daughter of the family, she took on a lot of responsibility as the family expanded. She often worked alongside her mother to care for her three younger brothers and complete chores, especially when financial circumstances were difficult for the Fosters.
Education
Snow attended West High School in Salt Lake City. She also attended the University of Utah but did not graduate it.
Snow started her career as a secretary for the Utah chapter of the American Silver Mining Commission. While at this position, she decided she would like to work abroad in addition to her aspiration to write her own "great American novel". Her employer had a connection in China, ultimately secured a job for Helen with the president of an American company in Shanghai. So she went to China in 1931 where she worked as a book reviewer. In 1934 she became a correspondent for the China Weekly Review in Shanghai. In 1937, she and her husband, Edgar Snow, founded Democracy Magazine, and the next year they began the Gung-Ho movement. Over the next twenty years, the co-ops spread throughout China and were supported by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse Tung (Zedong).
Since 1940, Helen spent the rest of her life in Connecticut, first working as a reviewer for Saturday Review of Literature and then as a freelance writer, developing an interest in family genealogy, drafting a novel, and writing short pieces on her experiences in China. She also served as a member of the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy.
Helen returned to China twice more in her lifetime. The first visit was from 1972 to 1973, following President Richard Nixon's trip in 1972 which eased relations between China and the United States. The second visit was in 1978 when Helen returned to China for six weeks with a camera crew. There she was interviewed and asked to recount her adventures of the 1930s with Edgar. She published her autobiography in 1984.
During his career as a journalist and writer, Snow wrote several books about her work in China, including The Chinese Labor Movement, Inside Red China which was reprinted as New China, China Builds for Democracy: A Story of Cooperative Industry, and Women in Modem China. Snow was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1981. Her other works include family genealogies, historical plays, and books penned under the name of Nym Wales. These include The Land beyond the Kuttawoo: The Madison Story, The Left-Wing Painters and Modem Art in China, 1933-35, and My China Years: A Memoir.
In June 1996, Helen was honoured by the Chinese government as Friendship Ambassador, one of China's highest honours offered to foreign citizens. She was the first American and only the fifth person ever to receive the award.
Part of a hospital and a school in Xi'an, China, were named after her. There is also a Helen Foster Snow wing in the Communist Eighth Route Army Museum in Xi'an and a Helen Foster Snow Society in Beijing. In 2009, the US-China Cultural Exchange Committee placed a 7-foot (2.1 m) tall bronze statue of Helen Foster Snow, cast in China, in the Main Street Park of her hometown of Cedar City.
