About the author
Ye Fu (“The Wild Man”) is the pen-name of Zheng Shiping, an independent Chinese author of Tujia ethnicity who was born in 1962 in the mountainous western part of Hubei Province. After college (and a second degree in Chinese literature) he worked in a variety of government jobs while writing poetry. In 1989 he resigned in protest from his position as a police officer. Caught soon thereafter in a sting involving purportedly classified documents, he was imprisoned for four years. After his release he founded a publishing company and wrote TV scripts. Most of the essays in Hard Road Home appeared in their original Chinese in the collection Jiangshangde Muqin, which won the nonfiction prize at the 2010 Taipei Book Fair. He has held writing fellowships in Amsterdam and Köln. Ye Fu lives in Yunnan Province.