Ai Wu

(pseudonym of T’ang Tao Teng). Born 1904. Chinese writer.

Ai Wu grew up in a teacher’s family. He traveled around southwest China and Burma for a long time, sustaining himself with incidental jobs. In Malaya in 1930, he joined the Communist Party. Ai Wu’s writings began to be published in 1931. His early works include the short story collections Notes of a Wanderer (1934) and A Southern Night (1935). The life styles of the peasantry, the urban poor, and the intelligentsia are described in his works written between 1937 and 1947, which include a novel, Native Places, the novellas in Fertile Steppe (1946), and the short story collections entitled Banana Valley (1937) and Autumn Harvest (1944). Among Ai Wu’s best works is a novel about resistance to aggressors, In the Hills (1948). Other publications are My Youthful Years (1944), an autobiographical novella; Return at Night (1957), a collection of short stories; and In Fire Steel Is Born (1958, Russian translation 1959), a novel.