As Hu Shih had once asked Frank Goodnow, Lin asked his old American friends why the Chinese didn’t deserve freedom. “Liberty for Americans is their life blood, but for Chinese, what does it matter anyhow?” he wrote to Pearl Buck. “The consigning of 500 million to totalitarian rule does not even arouse a ripple of phlegm.… I have no country to return to. I suppose Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley think I am a fool not to jump into the Communist heaven.”
