Edgar Snow considered making a trip to the Red armies in the Northwest as early as March 1936, and contacted David Yu, one of the leaders in the December 9th Student Movement, who was then in Tianjin. David agreed to his plan and thought that the Red Army authority “had no reason to refuse” his request ②, but nothing could be arranged then by David. At the same time Edgar Snow confided his idea for a trip to his publisher, Harrison Smith, owner of The Saturday Review of Literature and his own publishing house. Smith also encouraged him. Then should he make such a trip?
The Snow's life was very sweet and their work very successful at that moment. They had no wish to risk this for a totally unknown adventure. But no one, including the Chinese, had any idea of' just what kind of people the Red armies represented. They thought that someone had to find out, and no one else could or would make such a trip.
One spring afternoon, at their usual teatime rendezvous in the big living room, Edgar and Helen Snow, with the latter's urgent encouragement, made a momentous decision.
“It's dead right. You'll have to go at any cost,” Helen said to Edgar, “I would have gone with you if I could.③
At this urgent moment of decision, Helen displayed her characteristic sensitivity and rare cour¬age, and firmly supported Edgar to go to the Northwest without any hesitation. She shared her husband’s idea to search out truth, the facts and to publish this to counteract the lies which had been told year after year by the Kuomintang side. Helen did not have the least idea that what Edgar wrote about this journey would become a best selling book. But she was aware that his eight years in China needed either a climax or an anti¬climax to be justified.
Having made up his mind, Edgar Snow decided to go to Shanghai immediately, asking Song Qingling for help. He couldn't try to go to the Red areas without some kind of clearance. On April 29, Helen wrote to Henriette Herz, their agent: "Ed has to go to the South for a business trip but will be back soon." Edgar was back home from Shanghai by May 19, when a letter came from David. They tried to make sure of every detail about the trip on the one hand and prepare related materials, going shopping and packing on the other. Edgar took his injections against various diseases while Helen worked day and night on writing and typing the outline and questionnaire for his trip to the Northwest.
After his departure, nothing was heard from Edgar Snow for many months. Though Helen was worried to death, she had not expected to hear from him. She well knew how impossible communication was. On the contrary, she expected him to stay as long as possible to get a good story.
One September day, Wang Lin a secret Red courier, brought her a letter from Edgar Snow: "I wish you were here to share my experiences.④" However when she reached Xi'an in early October and was planning to meet her long departed husband in Northern Shaanxi to work together with him there, Liu Ding, the Communist representative in Zhang Xueliang's headquarters, advised her to leave Xi'an immediately, partly so as not to draw attention to Edgar Snow, who stood to lose his films and notebooks if discovered. Taking the situation as a whole into consideration, Helen went back to Peking after she had gotten a journalistic scoop from the Young Marshal.