Background
Gu Cheng was born in Beijing on 24 September 1956. He was the son of a prominent party member and the army poet Gu Gong.
顾城, 顧城
Gu Cheng was born in Beijing on 24 September 1956. He was the son of a prominent party member and the army poet Gu Gong.
At the age of twelve, his family was sent to rural Shandong because of the Cultural Revolution (as means of re-education) where they bred pigs. There, he claimed to have learned poetry directly from nature. In the late 1970s, Cheng became associated with the journal Today (Jintian) which began a movement in poetry known as "menglong" meaning "hazy", "obscure".
The two settled in Rocky Bay, a small village on Waiheke Island, Auckland, New Zealand in 1987.
Cheng taught Chinese at the University of Auckland in the City of Auckland. She died later on the way to a hospital.
The story of his death was widely covered in the Chinese media. The two-line poem titled ("一代人") was perhaps Gu Cheng"s most famous contribution to contemporary Chinese literature.
lieutenant had been considered an accurate representation of the younger generation during the Chinese Cultural Revolution seeking knowledge and future.
He was a prominent member of the "Misty Poets", a group of Chinese modernist poets.