Helen wanted to be a Great Author since the age of eight. That was why she went to China. But throughout their years in China, the Snows worked as a team on various projects, including the writing of Red Star over China. Helen spent a lot of her time and energy, encouraging Edgar to travel and write, and clearing the desks for him so that his mind could be devoted solely to his work. Her own attempt at a great literary contribution was put off time and time again.
In 1941 the Snows returned to the United States. They were embraced by everyone – from ordinary citizens to the Roosevelts – as pioneers in Sino-American relations. In the same year they bought an old farmhouse in Madison, Connecticut, where they lived quietly and wrote.
During the war years, there was a long separation between the Snows as Edgar was a war correspondent. By 1949, both Edgar and Helen decided that it was time for them to go in separate directions. In the same year the Chinese Communists won decisively over the Nationalists. Americans were horrified, and the United States cut off all contact with new China. At about the same time, McCarthyism infected the United States, and Helen was seen not as a bridge between the United States and China, but a Communist sympathizer. She was in limbo, rejected by her own country and cut off from her beloved China.
Edgar, the more visible of the Snows, eventually was hounded out of the country. With his second wife, he moved to Switzerland where he lived until his death in 1972. Helen remained in the Connecticut farm house, living close to nature. She kept observing, studying and writing about China without any consideration to publish them. She kept writing year after year, and ended up with some 64 books and manuscripts.
Throughout the cold war years, Helen was one of the few westerners who knew China from direct experience, not book learning alone. Her books, with their critical eyewitness accounts, always serve as important resources for scholars who are unable to study the country first hand.