方天(张海威)于1955至1957年间短暂居留马来亚。他居留新加坡期限,担任《蕉风》的首任编辑,同时大量创作写实主义的小说。他在独立的两年前途经马来亚,在此历史关键时刻,参与了当时集体澎湃的在地认同氛围,乃至创作、撰写艺评讨论马华文学的主体意识,甚是投入。在马来亚独立过后,《蕉风》与《学生周报》的出版社与印刷厂迁至吉隆坡八打灵,方天也离开马来亚。以后是否还有创作,至今仍未得知。但这两年“途经”与“停驻”马来亚的时期,不仅给他个人,同时亦给马华文学史留下精工细笔与在地化的现实主义作品。值得仔細阅读,观察其书写如何处理本土认同、阶层关怀及个体意识。可兹补充过去被忽略的非左翼现实主义研究,以及《蕉风》的现实主义研究。
Fang Tian (Zhang Hai Wei) stayed for two years in Malaya from 1955 until 1957. During his residence in Singapore, he held the position of the first editor of the magazine Jiao Feng, and wrote a lot of short stories in the realism mode. Malaya was an important station for him with the historical moment of independence around the corner. During the two years of his residence in Malaya, Fang Tian identified with the collective passion that had advocated the identification of the locality and the identity of the Malayan Chinese literature, to which Fang Tian has responded through short stories, scripts and critical writing. After the independence, the press headquarters and printing factory of both magazine Jiao Feng and Xue Sheng Zhou Bao(The Student Weekly) moved to Petaling Jaya in Kuala Lumpur. However, Fang Tian did not move to the new office in Petaling Jaya, instead he left Malaya afterwards. Whether had he continued to write is not known; there are no other writing by him been mentioned since then. However, for these two years of his residence in Malaya, he had left a lot of localized writing in realism which became the important material for Malayan Chinese literature in 1950s. The writings are worth close reading, to observe how the writing construct the local identification, the class consciousness and the individual consciousness at the same time. The studies on Fang Tian also provided an important supplement for the non-leftwing realism writing in the magazine such as Jiao Feng and Malaysian Chinese literature history studies.