Biography

苇岸 (1960-1999)，优秀散文家，原名马建国，生于北京市昌平县北小营村。1988年开始写作《大地上的事情》(新生代散文代表作)。1998年，开始创作《一九九八二十四节气》。1999年5月19日因肝癌医治无效谢世，享年39岁。苇岸一生文字很少，不足二十万字。生前只出版一部《大地上的事情》。在病榻上所编的第二本书《太阳升起以后》， 于2000年由中国工人出版社出版。

WEI AN was the pen name of Ma Jianguo (1960-1999), who grew up on the outskirts of Beijing and studied philosophy at People’s University. While in college he was influenced by the Misty poets and their work. He befriended Gu Cheng, and published his first poem in 1982, taking his pen name from a poem of Bei Dao’s. In 1986, poet Haizi introduced him to Thoreau’s Walden (in Xu Chi’s translation). Inspired by this book, Wei An turned from poetry to prose nonfiction and in 1988 began to write “Things on Earth,” sections of which were first published in 1991.

Wei An wrote essays about birch trees, beekeepers, bird’s nests, wasps, his travels to Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, people he knew, things he believed and writers he admired. In a short autobiographical essay, he listed the writers and poets he most respected: Thoreau, Tolstoy, Tagore, Whitman, Emerson, Kahlil Gibran, Hans Christian Andersen, Francis Jammes, Blake, Hesse, and Prishvin. He added apologetically that he was not familiar with the great corpus of traditional Chinese literature. Wei An never became well-known and his name is unfamiliar to most Chinese readers, but his life, work and beliefs are well remembered by poets, writers and critics. He was an idealist, a pacifist, a deep ecologist and a vegetarian at a time when these qualities made him unusual in China.

Wei An died of liver cancer at the age of thirty-nine. Many of his most well-known essays, including the original essay from which this translation was completed, are collected in his Zuihou de langman zhuyizhe (The Last Romantic), edited by Feng Qiuzi (Guangzhou: Flower City Publishing, 2009).

THOMAS MORAN teaches Chinese language, literature and film at Middlebury College. He is the editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 328: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949 (Gale, 2007) and has co-edited a forthcoming second volume in this series on Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950-2000. Moran’s current research interest is the history of contemporary Chinese fiction and prose nonfiction about nature and the environment. He translated Wei An’s “Life on Earth” while in Beijing in spring 2012 on a Fulbright grant. He lives in Ripton, Vermont.