Ebook: My China Years: A Memoir

Journalist, traveler, thinker, activist, above all a woman—a most unusual woman who was present at the creation of the new China and, though not a Communist, became something of a heroine to the people of that war-torn land.

When Helen Snow left Yenan in 1937, Mao Tse-tung entrusted to her a letter to one of his generals whom she expected to see the next week as she went on to interview others leaders of the Red armies. But when Helen reached his garrison he had left, to join the Kuomingtang forces in common war against the invading Japanese. She finally caught up with him in Washington, D.C., in 1979, where she at last delivered Mao’s letter to the visiting Deputy Prime Minister Teng Hsiao-p’ing (now Chairman Deng Xiaoping).

Huang Hua, appointed China's first ambassador to the United Nations, had a reunion in New York with Helen Snow, his old friend from activist student days at Yenching University, when he had acted as Edgar Snow's interpreter on his Red Star Over China trip to the front. And in 1980, when Chen Han-po came to the United States to open relations with American publishers, he set aside a day from his crowded schedule to visit Mrs. Snow in her Madison, Connecticut, home.