Helen Foster went to China in 1931 when she was 23. Clever, attractive, eager to be a writer, she first worked at secretarial jobs in Shanghai. There she met and married Edgar Snow, still a young and little-known journalist. Together they began to observe, study and write. In contrast to the mostly colonial-minded foreign community of the time, both shared similar feelings about China’s ordinary people, which conditioned all their subsequent writings and actions.
Encouraged by China's foremost author Lu Xun, Helen and Edgar worked on an anthology of short stories, Living China, published in London in 1936. Included in it was Helen’s essay, “The Modern Chinese Literary Movement”, which was the first analysis of the subject in English and “a lasting contribution to the Chinese people”.
In Beijing they became active backers of the December 1935 student movement that helped spark resistance to the threatened Japanese conquest of China.
In 1936, Edgar made his first-ever foreign journalistic visit to China's northwest, which resulted in his world famous work, Red Star over China. Soon after Edgar’s return from his trip, the other two Front Armies of the Long March met up with Mao Zedong. The red capital was moved from Bao’an to Yan’an. A Communist Party Conference would be held in early May. The Communists and Nationalists were negotiating the formation of the National United Front against the Japanese aggression. Helen realized this was a special occasion. Eager to personally witness the growing Communist movement, Helen tried again to reach the Red armies in Yan’an.
In the spring of 1937, she arrived in Xi’an, which was then under Nationalist control. In the dead of night, she summoned incredible courage and managed to evade six armed guards assigned to prevent her from leaving. It was at the risk of her life that Helen escaped by jumping out from the window of the Xi’an Guest House during the martial law, and managed to get behind the Nationalist lines into Yan’an. She felt that all her years in China had been leading up to this moment – recording the birth of Chinese Revolution from a woman’s point of view – and she was determined to succeed.
Helen spent the next five months among the Red armies, interviewing Mao and many other top leaders and gathering material for what would become several books, including her classic Inside Red China. She accomplished a feat no one before or after her managed. She also observed first hand the forming of the Red Army into the 8th Route Army under the United Front. Additionally she wrote down autobiographies of 34 revolutionaries, including army commanders, women leaders and children. Because of this, she knew personally, top leaders in China from then until 1997 when she passed away.
Both Helen’s and Edgar’s books were quickly translated into Chinese and became crucial texts for the Chinese people to learn about China’s arising Communist Movement as well as important historical records for generations to come throughout the world.
Helen’s role in telling the story of Mao Zedong and his comrades to the West was critical. To the Chinese, she was a heroine for being among the very few to chronicle events surrounding their revolution. To historians and scholars in both China and the United States, her firsthand account was a substantial contribution to the record of some of the most important periods in world history.