Helen Snow

Helen Foster Snow, a long marcher for China, died on January 11th 1997, aged 89

Clever women run the risk of being overshadowed by clever men who happen to be close to them. Zelda Fitzgerald comes to mind. A writer of talent, she had the misfortune, professionally, to be married to Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps the finest American writer of this century. Gwen John was probably a better artist than Augustus John, but her brother was the celebrity. However the coin spins, a woman may feel she is the loser. Helen Snow certainly felt that.

In 1938 her husband, Edgar Snow, made his name with “Red Star over China”, the first substantial account of what the Chinese communists were up to. It brought Mao Zedong to the attention of the outside world. A year later Helen Snow published her own account of meetings with Mao, “Inside Red China”. She had sought out Mao on her own in Hunan, his home province, after the communists had ended their extraordinary 6,000-mile “long march” for survival. She had spent four months with him, a whole summer, much longer than Edgar had managed. But her book was little noticed. Edgar had got the scoop. Just in case anyone linked his wife with him, he persuaded her to publish her book under a pseudonym, Nym (Greek for name) Wales (Utah-born Helen had Welsh relations).

Mrs Snow’s book and the 40 or so other books and papers she wrote, mainly about China, are thought these days to be superior to her husband’s work. Edgar Snow was a journalist. As journalists do, he endeavoured to write entertainingly, offering quick judgments that pass muster at the time but, in some cases, turn out to be facile, or indeed wrong. Mrs Snow declined simply to pick out the busy bits from the mound of original information she collected on the Chinese communists and their leaders, and throw the rest away. History was so important, she said, she could not trust herself to make selections. Her archive, in numerous boxes of documents which she “dragged halfway round the world”, is now pored over by researchers at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank analysing the events of this century.

The China where Helen arrived in 1931, aged 24, was attractive to adventurous young Americans. Europe, with Paris and all that, had been the place of the 1920s. China seemed new, and was cheap, for those with dollars. A bestseller in America was “The Good Earth”, written by Pearl Buck, a missionary who was later to receive the Nobel prize for literature. Helen was going to become “a great author”. She took a slow boat to China, steaming up the Whangpoo river to Shanghai. Her father, a lawyer with a mining company that had connections in China, had set up a secretarial job for her in Shanghai. In the evenings she met other Americans in a place called the Chocolate Shop, favoured for its ice-cream. One of them was Edgar Snow. They were married 18 months later. What Mrs Snow called “the boiler of marriage” multiplied “all their powers manyfold”. The boiler blew up in 1949, when the Snows were divorced. Their experience was worthy of a better ending, she said, with its “struggle between good and evil” in China.

The evil was the Japanese invaders. By 1937, when Japan launched a full-scale attack on China, America was already anti-Japanese. The Flying Tigers, a squadron of American pilots, was fighting for China. Both the Snows forsook their neutrality and marched in patriotic parades mostly composed of students. Their home became a refuge for anyone hiding from not only the Japanese but also Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. And the “good”? Mrs Snow came to the conclusion that socialism offered a good future for China, guided by what she called “its historically high ethics”. She and her husband were never communists, but were content to be of the left. Joe McCarthy, the scourge of American radicals, never touched them.The Soviet Union was his black beast. The “loss” of China saddened and puzzled many Americans, but China, until recently, never seemed a threat, but more a part of the mystery of the East.

Just before she died, China named Helen Snow a “friendship ambassador”, about the highest compliment it can pay to a foreigner. The Chinese had in mind her pioneering of the “gung-ho” movement. Gung-ho, from the Chinese gonghe, meaning working together, came to be shorthand for the industrial co-operatives set up in China to fight the Japanese invasion. A number of westerners in China pushed for the idea, which seems originally to have come from Sweden, and Mrs Snow was the most vigorous pusher.

The co-operatives were supported by Mao, and by Chiang Kai-shek when he joined with the communists to fight the Japanese. After the communists took power it was the communes that were gung-ho. The name was given to co-operative movements in Japan and elsewhere, most notably in India. And Helen Snow, the middle-class girl from America’s west, took pleasure from the knowledge that gung-ho was the slogan of the marines in the second world war.