Coming Home

Friends in Seattle remember Betty Graham as a slender, doe-eyed girl with a "restless mind." Majoring in psychology at the University of Washington, she was a topflight student and a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority member with a normal interest in fun and parties. But she had no time for a steady boy friend or the small college talk of her friends; to her friends she seemed to be seeking a more intellectual interest.

In the summer of 1936, when she was 20, she found it. She went to Shanghai to visit her architect father (with offices in Seattle and Shanghai), and fell in love with China. To help tell China's story to the world, she decided to be a newspaperwoman.

She became a good one. The Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury put her to work as a cub reporter. In 1937, when she was taking pictures in Korea, the Japanese clapped her in jail as a spy, but let her go after a small fine. Four years later, as a reporter for N.E.A., she covered the Sino-Japanese war and scored a worldwide beat with her pictures and eyewitness account of the Japanese use of poison gas in the battle of Ichang.

The New Wave. She was a minor celebrity when she came back to the U.S. in 1942 to champion the cause of the Chinese Nationalists. For a while she worked in Washington, covering the State Department for International News Service, switched to OWI and later to the New York Herald Tribune. But she was not happy away from China, and in 1946 she went back.

Her old Nationalist friends found her changed. She had embraced a new cause: Communism. She became friends with Mao Tse-tung and other top Reds. Her letters from within Red China to her father in Seattle grew more & more shrill in their denunciation of U.S. policies. Last May she rejected her father's plea that she come back to the U.S.: "Whenever I hear from any of my progressive friends it's the same story. Persecution, false accusations, rigged juries, illegal court decisions . . . How can you want me to return to such a life? It would be like returning to a nightmare world. I am happy here in China and I don't want to leave this wonderful and invigorating place."

New Developments. Then, abruptly, the tone of her letters changed. There were "new developments," she wrote last July, and she was "thinking seriously of returning to the States after all." In September she was still trying to get ship passage, promised to be home "inside of a couple of months." Four months later, John Graham got a Christmas card which indicated that she had written several letters he had not received. She still couldn't complete arrangements" to leave the seaport of Tientsin.

It was the last word from Betty Graham to the folks at home. Last fortnight John Graham got a terse cablegram from the Peking Ministry of Health: Betty had died "unexpectedly." The Communist radio announced last week that she had been buried "in the sanctuary of eternal repose" in the Western Hills overlooking the ancient city of Peking. Said John Graham : 'She was coming home -- and she didn't come home."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.