We are here today to celebrate Helen’s life, because it is a glorious life. Helen’s life is a life of a dedicated quest for truth, goodness and beauty. Helen’s life was closely connected with the history of the Chinese revolution as well as the program of China’s modernization.
During her ten-year stay in China, Helen Foster Snow made great contributions to various spheres of the Chinese culture. For instance, to modern Chinese literature and art, to the 1935 Student Movement, to the United Front of the Chinese people against Japan and to their Industrial Cooperative Movement.
Helen Snow is always regarded as a bridge between the Chinese and American peoples. Why is Helen Snow so very well remembered among 1.2 billion Chinese people? I think one of the important reasons is that Helen always told the truth; she wrote about the actual facts of China and told the whole world about the truth of the Chinese Revolution.
During her two return trips to China in the 1970’s, she did a similar thing. In her books, she gave a true picture of the great achievement accomplished by the Chinese people after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Another characteristic of Helen was that she not only truthfully told the people what happened in China, but also told the people, in advance, what would happen in China.
Everybody knows that it was Helen Snow who foretold the second cooperation between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists seventy days before the Xi’an Incident. She also told many Americans who stayed in Asia, as early as the beginning of 1940, that something very important would happen between Japan and the United States. But very few people thought that would happen - until the next year when the event of Pearl Harbor took place.
Helen is a person who lived ahead of her time. So that is why she is always well-remembered in China and that her name, along with Edgar Snow’s, is a household word in China. Everybody who reads knows of Edgar Snow and Helen Snow, and she is a very special friend of the Chinese people. She played a very special role in various stages of the development of Sino-American relations.
We are here today to celebrate her life and cherish fond memories of our personal contacts with her. As far as I understand, nearly everyone who has worked with her and who has read her books has been changed. I am among those people.
I read her books about thirty years ago when I finished my college. It was so fortunate that I personally met her in 1978 when she was in China with a TV crew, headed by Tim Considine. Her first comment was, “Oh, during my whole trip in China I have met a lot of old friends who knew Chinese history very well, and also a lot of young people who speak very good English. But you are the only person who knows both the history and English.” So very soon we became very good friends.
So in the past 19 years I have worked very closely with Helen Snow and, of course, she always pushed me to do the translation of her books. She always kept me busy, even today. I’m sure I will become even busier when I return to China after this two-week trip to the United States.
But I think my life has been greatly changed through my study of her books, translating, and the study of her life. It is worthwhile for us to continue to carry this special relationship between Chinese and American people in this special moment.