Foreign Languages Press

Silage Choppers and Snake Spirits follows the journey of two Americans who left the United States to join the Chinese revolution. Sid Engst came from a poor farming family in upstate New York and found himself on the run from Chiang Kai-shek’s generals in the barren hills of northern China. Joan Hinton went from working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos to wearing disguises and ducking the Nationalist government in the Chinese communist underground.

This biography follows their experiences working alongside ordinary Chinese people in the countryside. Their participation in the struggle for production and in the many dynamic mass movements is a rare window into the daily work and study to build a new society, culminating in their fight in the Cultural Revolution against special privileges for foreign revolutionaries – a fight that Mao himself recognized and approved.

Foreward by Julie de Lima-Sison