Helen Snow wrote 64 books in her lifetime. Due to political reasons, only seven of them were published in the United States. Her house was full of books, manuscripts, notebooks, files, newspapers, and newspaper clippings, most of which were related to China. In the 1960s she sent part of her file to the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. By 1995, she was fully aware that her days were limited. She asked her niece Sheril Foster Bischoff and husband to come to Madison to help. Mr. and Mrs. Bischoff flew from the west coast to Connecticut about five different times over a period of three to four months, each time spending a week cleaning the files that were all over the house. They packed everything up, put them into 300 boxes and had them transported to their home state, Utah.
Helen Snow passed away on January 11, 1997. I made three different trips to the United States that year - to attend her memorial service, to work with her niece, Sheril, to compile, translate and publish her photo biography, Bridging, and to help the library of Brigham Young University with the Helen Snow collection. Among the 300 boxes of files, 20 boxes contained her letters written to and from different people in the past 60 years. Helen paid great attention to collecting all her papers from the beginning of the 1930s. She kept a copy of every single letter she sent out, and she put all the letters from her friends into different categories. To my great surprise I found that every single letter I had written to her was carefully kept in one of the boxes. Before 1985 I did not have any copy of my letters to Helen because I did not use a computer nor did I have a typewriter. All my letters were handwritten. I felt curious and interested to see those handwritten letters from years ago, so I made copies of them for myself and brought them back to China in a big paper bag.
When I returned from my trip to the United States in 1997, I put together all of my letters to Helen and from Helen to me, totaling 200. Then I read all of the letters from beginning to end. I then had a much better understanding of what she had written and I thought a lot about them. In those letters Helen Snow was telling about the history of the Chinese revolution to a young Chinese and sharing her unique experience in China with him. She also expressed her viewpoint on the modernization and construction in China, and she wrote about the special relationship between China and the United States. Her concern about China’s future, her love toward the Chinese people and her great respect for the first generation of the Chinese leaders were demonstrated in between lines of every single letter. My letters to Helen, particularly those in the early days, were very sincere, true to the facts, and some times sounded a little bit childish. However, these letters expressed the profound friendship of the Chinese youth and the people for her. And also I truthfully recorded the progress of the Snow studies in China, particularly in Shaanxi Province. They showed the special relationship between the people in China’s northwest and the two Snows.
One casual conversation with Mr. Ma Ke sparked his interest immediately. We were saying that these letters could be put together and published both in English and Chinese. I was suggested to arrange these letters chronologically and Mr. Ma would translate them. Neither of us expected that it would become a very meaningful plan. But we meant what we said and Mr. Ma began to do the translation around his busy schedule. Once the first draft of the Chinese translation was finished the total length was 400 pages, so our original plan had to be changed. It would be inconvenient to have a book of over 800 pages. We would have to publish two separate books. So the Chinese version was first published in January 2003. Sheril and Garth Bischoff and other American friends were very happy to hear this and wanted to have the English edition published as soon as possible because everyone was eager to read these human letters.
While compiling these letters the only pity was that I was unable to find the first letter Helen Snow wrote to me. I remembered that I received it by the end of 1978 and I translated it into Chinese and sent it along with the original letter to my leaders in the Foreign Affairs Office. This was part of the discipline of Foreign Affairs in those days. I must handle letters from overseas in this way. In 1979 I also received two letters from Helen and I sent them on to my leaders again. So later I checked the files in the Foreign Affairs Office but was unable to find these letters, and most probably they were lost. These kinds of letters were only sent to the leaders for their reference; they were not the kind of documents that would be kept permanently. The only other possibility is that if I return to Brigham Young University next time I will check in the Helen Snow Collection there to see if I could find these three letters.
During my work in the Foreign Affairs Office my main job was interpretation. Written translation and study were my hobbies after work. These were my hobbies of asking for troubles. It resulted in my translating and publishing five of Helen Snow’s books - The American Experience in China, My China Years, My Yan’an Notebooks, Mao Country, China Builds for Democracy, and half of her book, Red Dust. Also, I translated and published some of her articles and poems in order to attend the different Snow symposiums held at home and abroad. Before her death, Helen Snow requested that I re-translate her book Inside Red China. She had two major reasons for re-translating her first book. First, two versions of this book were published in China. For various reasons a lot of important content was cut out. The Chinese readers could not view the original version. However, she could fully understand this situation. She did not mean to complain. The second reason was that she believed that I had a much better understanding of her life than other translators. My work and translation would be much more serious and truthful to the original book. Helen thought that her first book, Inside Red China, was one of the classics and should become a reliable resource book for scholars to refer to. So the content should be true and accurate. Therefore the translation should be smooth, the names of people and places and historical events should be accurate without any mistakes.
For anything valuable, its value was not always appreciated until it was lost. Helen Snow’s life was a very rich and colorful one. Her contribution was outstanding in different fields. Helen Snow was an individual who lived ahead of her time. During her later years, the value of her ideas and her works was becoming known to people. After her death, her work attracted more attention from different parts of the world.
The passing away of Helen Snow indicated the ending of a time. Today when human society has entered the 21st century, the special US-China friendship forged personally by the older generations of our two countries is becoming more precious.
Her passing away is not the end of the Snow studies but just the beginning.