This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2009, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Cedar City » Most Utahns have likely never heard of Cedar City native Helen Foster Snow. But in China, she's a superstar.
Foster Snow, born in Cedar City in 1907, became a journalist who chronicled the strife of war and revolution in China in the 1930s and played a role in creating a movement of industrial cooperatives known as Gung-Ho (work together).
Last week, nearly two dozen Chinese officials traveled to this southern Utah city to pay tribute to a woman they revere.
"In China, she is considered one of the 10 greatest women of the 20th century," said An-Wei, a Snow biographer and president of the Edgar and Helen Snow Studies Center in Xian, China. She spoke at a symposium on Foster Snow last week at Southern Utah University.
He and 19 other Chinese scholars, business people and government officials traveled to Utah to present the city with a bronze statue of Foster Snow.
She and her husband, Edgar, were among the first journalists to interview Chinese communist leaders, including Mao Zedung. The cooperatives they established helped residents in rural areas survive the chaos that enveloped the country when it was at war with Japan.
"Mrs. Snow liked to point out that besides starting the Gung-Ho movement, she helped enrich the American vocabulary with the term," said an obituary published in The New York Times when Foster Snow died in Connecticut in 1997. A year earlier, the Times said, China had named her a Friendship Ambassador, one of the highest honors for a foreign citizen.
Foster Snow's parents were college-educated and her mother, an active Mormon, community leader and activist for women's rights, instilled in her daughter a strong sense of self-worth and determination, according to biographers and a documentary film by Dodge Billingsley.
During her years in Cedar City, Foster Snow learned about farming and camping, kept a journal of her experiences, and was immersed in the spirit of communal cooperation prevalent among Mormon communities in southern Utah at the time.
Those skills would later prove invaluable in China.
Foster Snow's family sent her to high school in Salt Lake City, and she graduated from West High after serving as its student body vice president. After a brief stint at the University of Utah, she left with hopes of becoming a novelist. Instead, at age 23 and on her own, Snow boarded a ship that several weeks later deposited her on the waterfront in Shanghai, at the time a city of competing foreign factions and political intrigue.
Kelly Ann Long, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University and the author of Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China , described her as an ordinary woman whose choices made her extraordinary.
"As her life unfolded, she found herself in important places at important times," said Long, who spoke at the symposium in Cedar City. "She was in the right place at the right time and brought the right spirit."
Once in Shanghai, Snow worked briefly as a secretary with a group of industrial bankers in the city and later as social secretary at the U.S. consulate. But she also explored the city and its people. With a Brownie camera given to her by her mother, she photographed the waves of refugees streaming into the city after a devastating flood of the Yangtze River in 1932 left 600,000 dead.
That same year, she met and married aspiring journalist Edgar Snow, and the couple moved to Beijing, where they hobnobbed with the city's intelligentsia, which included many other Westerners, Long said.
In Beijing, Snow attended the university and studied Marxism and Chinese, working with students who advocated the expulsion of imperialist Japanese tolerated by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.
In 1936, her husband visited the communist occupied northwest territory of Yenan, where he met Mao and other communist officials. That visited resulted in a bestselling book, Red Star Over China, in 1938. Foster Snow maintained she was partially responsible for the book, and later felt slighted that her husband got all the credit, according to Billingsley's film.
Intrigued by her husband's experience, Snow visited Yenan a year later, becoming one of a handful of journalists to interview Mao and other Communist leaders. To get there, she had to pass through Xian, a city controlled by the Nationalists, who discouraged journalists from reporting on the communists. A determined Snow escaped Xian in the dark, and after an arduous journey, arrived in the territory, where communists were regrouping after their famed 6,000-mile march.
While Foster Snow wrote about politics under the name Nym Wales, she also wrote of rural Chinese women and children and easily adapted to their austere lifestyle in part because of her early life in Cedar City, Long said. Her experiences resulted in a book: Inside Red China.
Returning with her husband to Shanghai in 1937, now fractured by war with the Japanese, she developed the industrial cooperative concept and helped implement it. The cooperatives flourished in China for more than two decades and the concept was later adopted in India.
Foster Snow and her husband returned to the United States in 1940, but divorced in 1949.
Never as well-known in her own country as in China, Foster Snow continued writing about her experiences until her death. And she always kept in touch with her family in the West.
Debra Foster of North Salt Lake, a niece who attended Wednesday's statue unveiling, remembers her aunt twice visiting her family when they lived in Colorado in the 1970s.
"She was an amazing woman who was very intelligent," said Foster. "We called her a walking encyclopedia."
But Foster also described her aunt as a bit eccentric.
"She'd take us shopping at the Good Will store and would embarrass us with how she dressed in furs," said Foster. "She stood out in a crowd."
Mayor Gerald Sherratt, who helped bring the Chinese delegation to Cedar City, said the statue will be placed in a city park.
"I hope the Chinese who come here to visit our national parks will stop in Cedar City to renew that covenant between our people," Sherratt said at the symposium. "If we all believe in love between peoples and foster that, then life will be glorious."
mhavnes@sltrib.com" Target="_BLANK">mhavnes@sltrib.com