I began writing in 2018, but I first learned about him many decades ago. Back then, I didn’t know I was to write such a book. At the very first, all I knew about Mu Dan (1917-1977), except for his poems, was next to nothing: Mu Dan was a native of Haining and Mu Dan was the penname of Zha Liangzheng. The Zha clan is 2,600 years old if one really wants to trace the ancestral roots of the Zhas. The surname has been in Haining for nearly 600 years. The Zha branch in Haining has had many outstanding members. To most Chinese, the most outstanding member is Zha Liangyong, aka Jin Yong, a Wuxia novelist. Mu Dan, however, is little known to most Chinese even though his poems are popular inside literary circles.

I learned about ten years ago from Zha Yinchuan, the eldest son of Mu Dan, that Mu Dan had never visited Haining even though he always wrote Haining as his hometown whenever he filled in forms. He was born and brought up in Tianjin. After a four-year study in America, he came back to Tianjin and taught at Nankai University until he passed away in 1977.

In September 1996, I received the Complete Collection of Mu Dan's Poems, just published by China Literature Press, from Zou Jingzhi then working at Poetry Monthly, the country’s number one poetry publication. I spent three days reading the first volume. It was the first time that I learned so much about Mu Dan’s poems. The poems were astonishingly beautiful. Many Chinese poets in the 1990s began studying the translated works of foreign poets and many Chinese poets were deeply influenced by translated poems stylized by Chinese language and foreign languages. Some even deliberately wrote poems in this style. After reading Mu Dan’s poems, which added up to about 150 in number, I became aware that Mu Dan wrote poems in such a style decades ahead of the poets in the 1990s and that his exemplary poems were a landmark that should never be overlooked.

In the early years of the 21st century, I began to toy with the idea of writing a book about Mu Dan. It occurred to me that I needed to visit Haining. First of all, Haining is where Mu Dan came from. Secondly, I learned that Chen Boliang, a scholar in Haining, was writing a biography of Mu Dan. On August 24, 2003, I visited Chen Boliang at his home. My intention was to borrow a book about Mu Dan published in 1987 in commemoration of the tenth year of the demise of Mu Dan. Chen was very cautious. He was all mum about the fact that he was writing a biography of Mu Dan. He said he had the book but he was not sure exactly where it was in the heaps of books in his study. But in the following conversation, he mentioned his correspondences with Mu Dan’s wife, Mu Dan’s younger sister, and Mu Dan’s adult children. I was aware that he had conducted a very good research on Mu Dan due to his early start. The 30-minute conversation was courteous but not extremely helpful.

In March 2005, I received a copy of  from Chen Boliang. I phoned him and congratulated him. He asked me directly about the progress I was making in the book I was writing. He warned me that a scholar was writing a critical biography of Mu Dan. I wasn’t straight with Chen. Frankly, I am not honest if I say I never thought of giving up. But I persisted.

I did not decide to write the book until 2018. Some friends and scholars in the literary circles knew about my plan and urged me to go ahead. In 2018, I published an essay online in commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Mu Dan. An editor read my essay and contacted me. Half a year later, the publisher gave me the green light and I began writing. I spent 11 months in 2018 writing the book. When I found I got stuck, I decided to do some additional research.

My research progressed slowly but steadily. In October 2019, I even had a long talk with the 101-year-old Yang Yi, a preeminent translator in her prime years. I visited her and, to my surprise, she spoke clearly and her memory was miraculously sharp. I made a call in advance and on the afternoon of the next day, we talked the whole afternoon about Mu Dan. The retired translator was very happy. After the visit, she even walked me to the gate of the residential compound.

And I visited the archives of Nankai University to see whether there was something that could help me finish the book. The hotel where I stayed was just a stone’s throw from the house where Mu Dan once lived. A friend in Tianjin told me something about Mu Dan. It was in the 1980s. The friend went to the Nankai University library to check out some poetry collections in English. He found that Zha Liangzheng had been the only reader of all the English poetry books. On the bus to the university, I chatted with a woman and she said she had seen Mu Dan on the campus from afar so many decades ago. She said there should be a book about Mu Dan so that his story could be known to the world. 

Though the book is not yet published, I feel I have rediscovered Mu Dan through research and writing.