" Where the Sun Rises "
Sun Hua, People’s Daily  ( May 12, 2015, Page 24 )

Bridging—the Life of Helen Foster Snow, compiled by Sheril Foster Bischoff, translated by An Wei and Mary Niu, Beijing Publishing House

2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist war. Around the time the war against Japanese aggression broke out, foreign journalists were the most active in China, and Helen Foster Snow was an outstanding representative of them. Reading the Bridging—the Life of Helen Foster Snow will give one a glimpse of the reason behind the success story of Helen Foster Snow as an excellent journalist.

In August 1931, Helen Foster Snow arrived in Shanghai and worked as a clerk in the US consulate. While Edgar Snow came to China with a reference letter from Walter Williams, then Dean of School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Helen Foster Snow came to China with one letter from US senator Reed Smoot with the idea of landing a job in the business or education sector. It turned out that her third choice of occupation became her career. She once mentioned: “I got a job in Seattle-based Scripps-Canfield League of Newspapers, but what I wrote must be aimed at reviving the dead tourism industry and moving toward the charming golden Orient.” As a special correspondent, Helen Foster Snow reported on flood-stricken victims in China on 10 August 1931, even four months earlier than what Edgar Snow wrote In the Wake of China’s Flood.

In the book Bridging—the Life of Helen Foster Snow are precious photos exhibiting Helen Foster Snow’s reports on the social changes in China, enabling the world to understand better a real China. She was the first foreign journalist who introduced Chinese left-wing painters and modern Chinese literature movement to the West; she supported and disseminated the December 9th Movement; reported to the world the Xi’an Incident before it happened; interviewed over 60 generals of the Red Army and introduced Mao Zedong and his Ten-Point Programme for Resisting Japan and Saving the Nation to the whole China and the West… In 1971, when the People’s Republic of China restored its legitimate seat in the United Nations, Helen Foster Snow went to New York to welcome her old friend Huang Hua in assuming the new post and published a congratulatory article in the New York Times. After the visit of US President Richard Nixon to China in 1972, Helen Foster Snow sold her belongings to fund her visit to China. She visited China again and made a feature film in 1978, and later wrote Return to China and Mao Country.

Reading Bridging—the Life of Helen Foster Snow makes one understand profoundly why Helen Foster Snow was nominated twice for Nobel Peace Prize and why she was the first to be awarded The Writer’s Prize for contributing to International Understanding and Friendship. Helen Foster Snow’s love for China remained unchanged. She once expressed in a poem Eternity her willingness to let her tomb face east where the sun rises. Helen Foster Snow helped China and the US understand each other better through her works on China. Her “bridging” spirit proves that American people and Chinese people are able to find common ground for ever-lasting friendship.

Helen Foster Snow was a prolific writer. Only three books she wrote were published before she left China in 1940, while the rest of her works were published after China and the US established diplomatic relations in 1979. Salisbury once said: “Helen was lucky because her books, though not published in the US, were published in China one after another and what great solace this would be for Helen’s lonely heart in her late years.” In the autumn of 1991, when Helen Foster Snow learned that her famous work Inside Red China was reprinted in China, she said to a Chinese friend that her only wish was to publish her books so that the young generation in China and in the US could read them and not forget history. She wrote in the book Return to China that “the young generation is needed to make up for all the flaws in the past and carry on the torch of friendship... and I hope that the young generation could study history and continue the cause of building bridges”.

Release of the book Bridging—the Life of Helen Foster Snow is an embodiment of the “bridging” spirit in later generations and the youth. Today, the Tomb of Edgar Snow situated in the campus of Peking University has become a place frequented by Chinese and foreign nationals to remember the Snows. Some faculty members and students in Peking University have been writing academic papers on research on the couple. With a view to giving full play to the role of non-governmental diplomacy, China Center for Edgar Snow Studies has prepared and published a collection of works on Research on the Snows. Bridging—the Life of Helen Foster Snow is the fifth in the collection, written by Helen Foster Snow’s niece Sheril Bischoff and translated by An Wei and his wife, Helen Snow’s friends in China. They have made a contribution to carrying on Helen Snow’s cause of building bridges and are encouraging more young people to be part of the great cause.

Helen Foster Snow deserves the following compliment: “Mrs. Snow built a bridge of friendship, bringing the hearts of American people and Chinese people together. Her life is a reminder that behind the two hugely different political systems are real hearts of people, and their hearts and minds are not far away from one another.”