I made a statement at the international symposium on Edgar Snow in Beijing, 1988 that “with the time moving on, Helen Snow’s importance and the value of her ideas will be realized by more and more people.” In the past two decades or more, studies on Helen Snow at home and abroad have been emerging. In the wake of the Helen Snow symposium and the unveiling of her statue in Cedar City in 2009, the creation and performance of the dance drama, The Dream of Helen, has brought studies of Helen’s life and work to a new phase in the carrying forward of her legacy. This dance drama is another historical witness to the Special Friendship between the Chinese and American people.
Since China’s reform and opening-up, this great woman, whose contributions in China had been left unsung for a number of years, has finally come back among the Chinese and American people. As everybody knows, Helen Foster Snow was a great writer, journalist, poet and social activist. Hers was a life of a dedicated quest for truth, goodness and beauty, a life given to promoting human progress and world peace. Her life experience was closely connected with the just and arduous struggle of the Chinese people and her 10-year stay in China was part of our revolutionary history. With the growing interest in Helen Snow studies, it is not difficult to see some extraordinary aspects of Helen, which are relatively unknown to the public.