Wei was also a self-avowed pacifist and, in retrospect, a deep ecologist. Wei An was the pen name of Ma Jianguo who was born in 1960. He grew up on the outskirts of Beijing, studied philosophy at People’s University, and lived and worked in Changping until his death from liver cancer in 1999. We watched a video of Wei An’s wake. When he was dying, Ning Ken drove him to cemeteries, but Wei An could not find a place where he wanted to be buried. His ashes were scattered by friends over the wheat field he was writing about when he died.

Wei An did not catalog flora and fauna; he read natural history, but it was in order to better express his love for the world when writing about an encounter with poetry, philosophy and the myriad things on this earth.

In 1998 Wei An came to the wheat field on each day of the twenty-four solar terms of the traditional Chinese calendar, which include the equinoxes, the solstices and also, for example, the days Insects Awaken, Grain Rain, White Dew, and Frost Descending. On each visit he took a picture, recorded the time and weather, and made notes. I told Wei An’s sister and friends that in Vermont, my wife and I track the seasons by this calendar. She told us the wheat field is now a cement factory.

On Wei An’s bookshelf is a framed photograph of the brick farmhouse where he grew up. Wei An’s parents worked for the state. They had no land, no animals, and did not farm. But Wei An grew up in the countryside, and his work is an eulogy, sometimes angry, for the agricultural way of life. His nature is pastoral, intimate, just on the other side of domestication. He does not write about the wild. As an American, my impulse as a translator of Wei An’s is to make him a naturalist, but Wei An resists this. The essence of Thoreau for Wei An is not his call for a “return to nature” but rather for the “completion of man.” Wei An’s last word on Thoreau in an essay about the American writer is that Thoreau was a man of great love. Wei An did not catalog flora and fauna; he read natural history, but it was in order to better express his love for the world when writing about an encounter with poetry, philosophy and the myriad things on this earth. As a product of the age of irony, I find it impossible to reciprocate, without acting, the unguarded expression of emotion and the direct discussion of truth, beauty and goodness — the idiom in which Wei An’s friends engage the world. Their and Wei An’s romanticism embarrasses me; yet it reminds me that the romantic and the scientific engagements of nature developed together and cannot — or at least should not — be separated.