One in a Billion by Nancy Pine

Author:Nancy Pine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

• 9 •

Setting the Record Straight

Summer 1985, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia

No matter what Helen thought, An Wei planned to spend the year in Connecticut, and he knew he needed to prepare thoroughly. A conference to be held in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, by the Three S Society provided his first opportunity. Helen Snow had long been a taboo subject in China, and he wanted to know how the historians gathering at the conference about Edgar Snow and others who had reported on the Communist revolution would react to information he was going to present.

An Wei watched the Beijing and Shanghai experts as they arrived and greeted each other at a hotel in Hohhot. They would all make formal presentations, but he would have to deliver his material surreptitiously. Edgar had remarried after he and Helen divorced, and his widowed second wife was attending the conference. Chinese etiquette demanded that no one speak of a first wife, who traditionally was blamed for a divorce. Not even Helen’s good friends from her years in China could speak publicly about her. An Wei knew it would be difficult to have Helen recognized for what she had accomplished.

Furthermore, An Wei was, in Chinese terms, a small potato—an unknown from the hinterlands of China, lacking prestige, while those confident and polished experts from Beijing were academically respected.

He watched with apprehension as the registrar’s assistant inserted copies of his paper into participants’ bags. It consisted of selected letters he was translating for Helen. She and Edgar Snow had written them to each other when Edgar was in Beijing drafting Red Star Over China, his seminal book about the revolution, while Helen was in Yan’an interviewing and photographing Mao Zedong and other Communist Party leaders.

An Wei knew that she had an enormous amount of knowledge about a crucial time in China’s history that could be lost. He was determined to right this wrong, and he was not alone. Both Sharon Crain and Tim Considine also believed that Helen was a genius with extensive and invaluable knowledge about China’s revolutionary history. An Wei increasingly dedicated himself to preserving her work for the young people of China—and to reestablishing her reputation. The Hohhot conference would help him gauge how difficult this would be.

As more participants arrived, An Wei sat in the hotel foyer envisioning thin, dysentery-ridden Helen Snow sitting beside Mao Zedong in a Yan’an cave house, taking quick notes with her prized fountain pen. She described him as unusually tall and well built for a Chinese person, with “a shock of plentiful hair” that flopped down to his ears. Clothed in the steel-blue Red Army uniform she wore to protect her from looking like a foreigner, she probed the chairman on his evolving political theories. He was the brains and theorist of the party, she wrote later, “made of steel, of hard resistance and of tough tissue.”

An Wei believed that the letters he was distributing made it clear how much Helen had contributed to Red Star Over China, even though only Edgar was named as author.

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