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A Revealing Look at Hidden Aspects of Chinese Life and Culture
In the Prologue to SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS, author Seth Faison tells a story about Farmer Yang's discovery of the famed terra cotta warriors near the city of Xi'an. Like much of this revealing look at the China few Westerners ever see, however, Mr. Faison's narrative is more than just a retelling of history. After years of being unrewarded and forgotten, Farmer Yang was hired to sign copies of tourist books about the excavation site. As Mr. Faison soon discovers, there are two Farmer Yang's working at competing stores. Which one is real, or is either of them the true discoverer? Mr. Faison finds the truth, but in doing so, we learn that the real Farmer Yang is being paid a paltry 280 yuan a month, about $35, for his services. In his first fourteen pages, the author demonstrates convincingly that we are embarking on a true insider's tour of a fascinating country. I visited the terra cotta warriors site in 2000, and I bought one of those books and had it signed by "Farmer Yang." I even had my picture taken with him, but now I have no idea which Farmer Yang I actually met.
In SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS, Mr. Faison describes his experiences as a student at Shaanxi Teachers University in Xi'an, then as a journalist in China for most of 1987 to 1999. He cuts his reportorial teeth at the Hong Kong Standard and the South China Morning Post, then moves to the New York Times where he works as a roving reporter out of Beijing before being elevated to Shanghai Bureau Chief.
Mr. Faison's writings are loosely connected vignettes, drawn from the wealth of people and events he experienced during China's economic and cultural opening in the 1990's. As a result, his stories range widely over the Chinese terrain, not just geographically, but also politically and culturally. We see up close and from the inside the events at Tiananmen Square in mid-1989, DVD piracy in Guangdong Province, the Falun Gong sect in Yunnan Province, the Chinese government's actions in Tibet, illegal immigration to the U.S. from Fujian Province, homosexuality in Shanghai, and transsexuality in Beijing. In each instance, however, Mr. Faison gives us more than just reportorial narrative. His are intensely personal stories, first-hand accounts of Chinese life told by the people who have been living them. We meet a policeman in Xi'an, a gay professor in Shanghai, a video pirate in Guangdong, a renowned transsexual choreographer, a Fujianese woman who risked everything to help send her husband to New York, and a Falun Gong practitioner whose life was changed by their version of qi gong.
The author's personal story connects these various threads into a whole cloth. As Mr. Faison learns more and more about Chinese culture and life, he grapples with issues in his own life: a sense of not being sufficiently masculine, fear of emotional closeness, need for acceptance as a Westerner in China, and a sense of meaning and purpose. His slow discovery of China coincides with his own discovery of self, a journey that leads him through sexual relationships with Chinese women, a near addiction to sauna massages, an intense relationship with the transsexual Jin Xing, and a flirtation with Buddhism resulting from a trip to Lhasa. A return visit to Tibet in search of the opportunity to witness a Whitmanesque sky burial appears to create the necessary epiphany, the "St. Paul struck by lightning" moment, when the author realizes he is ready to move on to the next stage of his life, to accept himself for what he is and to commit himself to another person.
SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS is an engaging and highly readable story of China, its people, and one man's struggle to understand both that world and himself. Mr. Faison gently recaps China's recent history through the stories of individual citizens, exposing everyday elements of Chinese culture as well as selected aspects of its underside. Having lived in China (Suzhou) off and on since 2001, I can attest to his deft touch in bringing the character of the country and its people to life. I sometimes felt I could see the people he met even as I read about them, imagining their faces and body language and behaviors.
As almost anyone who has spent real time in China will say, the experience is life-changing. Seth Faison illustrates how and why. I heartily recommend SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of modern China and the life and culture and hopes and fears and dreams of its people.
-- Steve Koss (on Amazon.com) Oct. 1, 2005
"Seth Faison, a long-time foreign correspondent in China, most recently for The New York Times, has written the sort of book about China that we have been waiting for years to read. With an impatience for the superficial, an eye for the occluded detail, a deep empathy for the people he encounters, Faison gently, almost deceptively, unveils the layers of assumptions and generalizations that pervade much writing about China. The Chinese he meets, stumbles upon and searches for, from his first years a student in the early '80s, to the Chinese army colonel who undergoes a sex change operation, are vivid, real people, not cardboard the caricatures that too often sprout up in China books. South of the Clouds carries you from the explosive development, cultural and economic, of Shanghai to the massacre on Tiananmen Square in June 1989, from video pirates in Guangdong, to Tibetan Buddhist monks enduring, and withstanding Chinese communist repression. This is a book you read settled into a comfortable chair, with a fine glass of burgundy and quiet jazz on the radio. It will transport you."
-- Edward A. Gargan, author of 'The River's Tale'
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LOS ANGELES TIMES
Oct 12, 2004
SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS
by Seth Faison
As a young man from Brooklyn seeking adventure, Seth Faison found himself thrilled by the challenge of China's secrets, including Emperor Qin Shihuang's concealed tomb beneath a simple hill near Xian, the twilight industry of illegally copied music CDs, a furtive gay marriage in Shanghai and especially the shuttered land of Tibet.
In his first book, "South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China," Faison deftly evokes the vast country's contradictions and the fascinations it offered for him, both as a student of Chinese in Xian in the 1980s and as a reporter in the 1990s for a Hong Kong daily and then for the New York Times from 1995 to 2000.
His travail studying Chinese characters resonates: "I had to learn and forget a word ten to twenty times before I could hold on to it." Of the conformism in Chinese society, he writes, "I could understand those cowardly habits of mind because I had them myself…. I usually felt more comfortable at the rear of a crowd than at the front." The uncovering of Chinese secrets — endless because of China's uncertainties about itself — turned out to be the answer to Faison's felt vulnerabilities.
Romantic about life, Faison is realistic about China. Corruption rises like a stench from his pages. One chapter is titled "Encounters With the Police." Politics, of course, is the ultimate Chinese secret, and Faison threw himself into covering the democracy movement of 1989 and its tragic denouement in Tiananmen Square for the South China Morning Post; the stress and tumble of those events brought him to the brink of nervous collapse.
Burned out, he returned stateside, landing a job on the city beat at the New York Times. Hair-raising pages follow on the priests, dogma and ritual within this cathedral of journalism. Then in 1993, his coverage of the Golden Venture, which ran aground in New York harbor disgorging 300 would-be Chinese immigrants to eventual death, imprisonment or deportation, propelled Faison, by now fluent in Chinese, to become the newspaper's Shanghai bureau chief.
Careful readers may dispute some of Faison's statements: Deng Xiaoping was not one of the first high leaders — but among the last — to be purged in the Cultural Revolution. Dog is a delicacy not only in "poor and remote areas" but in the restaurants of many southern cities. But "South of the Clouds" is witty, sparse in a finely crafted way, full of unpredictable angles and penetrating in its moral simplicity.
Today Faison finds China's twin gods to be nationalism and foreign money, and everywhere one can see the "big bellies of sudden wealth." But his first impressions on arriving as a student in Xian in the '80s were of a "tangled mass" of train travelers, "teeming seas of cyclists" in city streets, "filthy" old trucks and pea-green dormitory hallways with the dimmest of lightbulbs.
Perhaps he portrays China this way at the start, the better to tear off the collective veil and reveal a quirky cast of Chinese characters later. Drawn to Chinese who flirt with the forbidden, he breaks journalistic rules — even writing a profile for the Times of a woman with whom he was having an affair.
Through the course of the book, Faison matures spiritually with the speed of a bamboo shooting up after rain. In Xian, he fumbles with Chinese characters, doubts his masculinity and has trouble bedding women. A decade later, "worn down by the emotional dislocation of being an outsider" in China, he goes to Tibet seeking an answer to the riddle of life and death. He watches a corpse pecked and transported to the heavens by whooshing vultures in a "sky burial" of Buddhist tradition. Rejuvenated, he declares his China experience over, quits the Times, marries suddenly and retreats to the never forbidden realm of Santa Monica.
Faison's intense experiences in China and Tibet taught him the preciousness of life. "What lies at the heart of most secrets is, in the end, utterly human," he writes. Indeed, "South of the Clouds" is an utterly human book, a stunning and delightful complement to his industrious newspaper dispatches. --Ross Terrill
Ross Terrill is the author of "The New Chinese Empire," which won the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for current interest.
REBECCA'S READS.com
April 24, 2005
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS
by Seth Faison
Seth Faison offers an intimate portrait from his years as an impoverished student to his return as a journalist, of a fabled people as he navigates past forbidding walls, both cultural & physical, & along narrow alleys & tortuous social mores, eating in chilly communal dining halls & dismal dormitories, in universities, industrial towns & capital cities to peek inside the shadowy corners of Chinese society.
Along the way, Seth Faison wrestles with who he is, where he came from & where he's going, sexually & spiritually. Often approached, in his early years in China, as a conduit for money changing or egress to America, he makes friends, although the mores of the time inhibited any romance. Later, when the choke-hold of communism has weakened, he finds the new Chinese women eager for one night stands. By then, he's found out about “Sauna Massages”, those elusive, erotic outlets “big noses” rarely discover. In the fullness of his return as bureau chief editor, he makes a unique connection with the brilliant choreographer, Jin Xing, China's first openly transsexual citizen.
I like the way Seth Faison seemed to be, with one glaring exception, in the right place at the right time as China unfurled from a closed, drab society into a bright new day of individuality, self-expression ... & revolution. The contrast between his earlier years & the later ones is all the more poignant because of his own maturity & standing.
While Seth Faison tells much of the inner machinations of the Communist Party, its leaders & internecine power plays, as well as the hierarchies of journalism -- all of which is fascinating -- neither is as interesting as the everyday complexities of social rituals, & the people he meets, loves, & leaves.
He is there when Mikhail Gorbachev visits; for the death of Hu Yaobang; the leadership battle between Zhao Ziyang & Deng Xiaoping; the Tiananman Square uprising; the opening up of Shanghai, & when Falun Gong spread like wild fire.
“For years, I had been searching for the secrets of Chinese culture, as though getting past all the thick walls and closed doors would deliver me. I had snuck into temples and military compounds. I had pursued politicians, chief executives, and criminals. I had visited schools and factories and cemeteries. I had been to almost every province in China and had met people from virtually every station in life. Whatever particular piece of information I sought there always seemed to be more that was unknowable, just out of reach. There were always more secrets. ” (page 272) Until Seth Faison found his way to Tibet & Buddhism, to a sky burial, & into the ineffable.
In South of the Clouds we are gifted with glimpses of the way China thinks -- politically & ideologically; the philosophy behind its ineluctable conformity; its implacable bureaucratic state of mind; its beliefs, religion, & identity. We also learn how complex, illustrastive & poetic is its language; how multi-layered its mores; how to find the “back door” to just about anything, & how to think with two hearts.
Outstanding!
FINANCIAL TIMES
January 21 2005
SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS
by Seth Faison
Seth Faison, who became the Shanghai bureau chief of The New York Times, began to understand China not as a journalist in Beijing but as a lonely language student in Xian. He became a reporter later, concocting a fictional curriculum vitae to get a job at the Hong Kong Standard.
There are parallels with the career of Peter Hessler, another American author who has brought China to life in an autobiography. Hessler became a journalist after teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer in the remote Sichuan town of Fuling, and went on to produce the evocative memoir River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.
Both writers, as they struggle to learn and eventually master the Chinese language, have the gift of being able to translate their personal experiences into a broader understanding of China and its hectic modernisation after the death of Mao Zedong.
Early on in South of the Clouds, Faison explains how he managed to persuade Old Yang, the guard at the student dormitory and the local eyes and ears of the Communist Party, to look out of the window when Faison wanted to sneak a girlfriend into his room. Yang, writes Faison with characteristic pithiness, “was the dirty, ill-cut fingernail at the end of the long arm of the state”.
Faison is brave, not for what he did in his 12 years in China, but for what he tells us about it afterwards. He is frank about his ambiguous sexuality, his visits to “Sauna Massage” parlours in obscure Chinese towns and his relationship with Jin Xing, a choreographer who had changed sex from male to female and was the first Chinese transsexual to speak publicly about the operation.
Jin’s life is only one facet of a rapidly changing China, a much bigger social, political and economic story that Faison captures with admirable clarity. His terse, first-hand description and analysis of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 is contemporary history at its best.
Today, Chinese leaders and their sycophantic allies in Asia insist that the Tiananmen demonstrators were hell-bent on destabilising China, while the popular view in the west is that the protesters were all heroic democrats crushed by a monolithic state. The real fight, as Faison explains, was more complicated and more interesting: it was not between the students and the authorities, but inside the communist leadership. While his sympathies lie with the protesters, Faison recalls that the demonstrations soon lost their focus, even as they spread to other parts of China. Extremist student leader Chai Ling defended her right to take money sent by sympathisers, “saying she needed it to fund her own escape from China and to have plastic surgery to make her eyes more round, which she said was for her own security”.
Faison is probably wrong to say that the crackdown backed by Deng Xiaoping ruined Deng’s reputation as a pragmatic reformer. Hessler, witnessing the grief of the Chinese at Deng’s death eight years later, is closer to the mark. Yet Faison the journalist in the 1980s and 1990s was right to insist - in the face of simplistic western views to the contrary - that China was being transformed from a tightly restricted police state into “a chaotic and semi-modern country at the turn of the century, an immeasurably freer place to live”.
That is where China is now, perched uneasily on the brink of the political reform that will inevitably follow the social and economic upheavals of the past 25 years. Faison’s insights into the odd mixture of nationalism, insularity and insecurity of the Chinese character allow him to make blunt assessments about Chinese culture, a difficult task for a Chinese author and a rash undertaking for a less-informed or unsympathetic outsider.
By the end, it seems only slightly strange that Faison claims to have found peace and understanding on a Tibetan hillside. He witnesses a “sky burial”, the Buddhist ceremony in which a corpse is chopped up, fed to the vultures and thus recycled through the heavens and the earth. For a journalist, this is obviously a good story, but his personal enlightenment is less easy to understand. One senses that Faison was tired, for the time being, of China. He was looking for an end to his tale, while knowing full well that the story of modern China was only just beginning.
---Victor Mallet
LEDUC REPRESENTATIVE
(Leduc, Alberta)
Friday March 11, 2005
This book is half genuinely interesting reporting from one of the most important cultures on the planet, and half miserable whining over the fact that the author, a hopelessly shallow man, completely unable to form a commitment to anyone or anything, has such a difficult time getting himself satisfactorily laid. Stop here if that bothers you, and I wish I had done just that myself. HH stars out of HHHHH are all I can give after both halves have been added back together. What might have been, could have been and arguably should have been a superior piece of writing, given the opportunities and insights Mr. Faison was granted in one of the most closed societies on our planet, ended up as a hopeless mish-mash of self-pity and mostly self-inflicted misery.
The book starts with the author’s initial foray into China on a student visa to learn the Chinese language; following that is his first reporting job in Hong Kong, and the beginning of his journalistic career in the most populous country in the world. Along the way, we’re treated to many intimate insights into the Chinese psyche, including coverage of the Tiananmen massacre. True to character, however, even though he and all his colleagues knew disaster was imminent, our fearless hero managed to be lounging in a comfortable hotel, far away, when the bullets began to fly. What this man has done with the opportunities he’s been given makes me sick. Ever one to avoid controversy and responsibility, he even has the gall to criticize the Chinese for being meek and accepting of tyranny. This book can best be described as a good look at China spoiled by having it pass through the viewscreen of a cretin. In case you have not guessed, the HH stars out of HHHHH that I did give this book are for the little bit of China that he did, probably by accident, manage to show.
---Edwin Pitts
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY --Sept. 6, 2004
South of the Clouds, by Seth Faison
In 1984, when Faison first went to China to study, the country was just recovering from the Cultural Revolution, and a "big nose" like Faison was quite the oddity. Still, Faison was sociable, chatting up everyone willing to talk. After a brief stint as a cub reporter at the Hong Kong Standard, he was assigned to Beijing in 1988, in time to cover the crisis of Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. Having become a China expert of sorts, Faison came back to New York and, after covering the Golden Venture sinking, returned to China in 1995 as the New York Times’s Shanghai bureau chief. While Faison tells the big stories with a journalist’s economy--just enough background to refresh one’s memory, coupled with an eye for telling details--it’s the smaller, more personal stories that enthrall. When he describes his midnight forays to the sauna massage spas at his hotels, or his love affair with China’s leading choreographer, a notorious transsexual, it’s hard to stop reading--and it’s not because he shares any prurient details. Readers will become very fond of Faison--his frank doubts about his masculinity, his willingness to wonder about his attraction to Chinese women and, yes, his longing for spiritual depth. An inspiring personal journey, an informative cultural exploration--Faison’s memoir works on many levels.
LIBRARY JOURNAL
October 2004
Inquiring and adventuresome, first visiting China in 1984 and later as a correspondent for the New York Times in Shanghai, Faison shares his authentic look at this great country so unlike our own. Having witnessed early political unrest, well before Tiananmen Square, Faison notes how, at that time, most of the Communist leadership was baffled and hesitated before taking action against the protesters. Gay China is also explored-Faison presides over a gay wedding and has a passionate affair with a famous transgender dancer. He describes everything with candor, warmth, and compassion, the most striking example of which is his moving spiritual revelation about his visit to Tibet, where he feels he finally attains grounding. Faison is a rarity, a man unafraid to admit that he isn't macho and appreciates the gentler side of human interaction. This sensitivity helps him to fare wonderfully in China, where he befriends many and succeeds in winning their trust and confidence, as well as ours. All large libraries must purchase this outstanding memoir.-Susan G. Baird
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