MEMOIRS BY journalists often treat the reader like a house guest forced to oblige the hosts as they pore over photo albums of their exploits. Each photograph has a major event obscured by the authors' determination to impose themselves in the foreground.
As a former Beijing correspondent for the South China Morning Post and the journalist who opened the New York Times Shanghai bureau, Seth Faison was in the frame during the Tiananmen massacre, the mainland's economic boom of the 1990s, the handover of Hong Kong, and the exposure of people-smuggling after the Golden Venture freighter ran aground off New York with 300 illegal immigrants on board in 1993.
His newly released memoir, South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China (St Martin's Press), describes the racial politics between Hong Kong journalists in the newsrooms of the Post and the Standard during the 1980s, his affair with revered transsexual dancer Jin Xing and his spiritual awakening after becoming one of the first western reporters to enter Tibet in the late 20th century.
Unlike many of his peers, Faison, 45, relates those events by focusing on ordinary people - not the world leaders whose words he taped at press conferences. His book is an anecdotal portrayal of China and the intricacies of its culture by a man who just happens to be a journalist. At times it appears more the work of the student who arrived in Xian in 1984, and of the author who now hopes to write novels and narrative non-fiction on China, than of the journalist who came in between.
Faison explains the changing ethos of the Chinese amid economic growth by recounting the lecture he received from his former Shanghainese girlfriend. The woman claimed family ties in America were cold compared with the sacred bond between relatives in China. Weeks later she confessed that she was a married mother who worked too hard to see her family. Her two-year-old son was in the care of his grandmother and her husband worked in Beijing.
Another of Faison's lovers, Jin, revealed to him the open-mindedness of the mainland in the early 90s. The dancer became interested in a sex change while studying in the US, but could not afford transgender surgery. She found skilled doctors in Beijing who were willing to conduct the surgery and a Chinese society that embraced her as a great dancer without treating her as a freak.