Sarah Paine

But anyway, it's the communist one who puts Mao on, I think, to Edgar Snow.

So someone goes to Edgar and says, hey, you want to come up to Yan'an to interview the big man?

And Edgar goes, sure.

and they infiltrate him through Japanese lines and all the rest of it.

And there's Mao, the busy man, who's spending hours with the 30-year-old, or I don't even know if he's this 20-year-old, I can't remember how old he was.

And Edgar Snow doesn't get it.

Like, why is he spending all this time with me?

And he's taken by it.

And Mao's, of course, showing him all the good stuff, right?

So Edgar Snow's seeing all the happy peasants

who've got the land and they're cooperating in the guerrilla, this and that.

And he is, what is it?

He is the last person to get out of Yan'an and then the Japanese in the war just shuts it down.

So no one's got any more information about Mao ever.

So Edgar Snow writes his book, Red Star of China.

He gives the drafts to Mao.

Oh yeah, he does the Mao interviews and then he has Mao correct them.

and his translator corrupt them back and forth, back and forth, which isn't the normal thing.

And then over the different editions of Red Star of China, because I've actually read them and followed the changes, more and more of it gets eliminated.

The original version has all kinds of pictures of people that Mao subsequently purges.