Faison, Seth 1959(?)–

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FAISON, Seth 1959(?)–

PERSONAL: Born c. 1959, in Brooklyn, NY; married Siobhan Darrow (a television correspondent); children: twins. Education: Attended Wesleyan University.

ADDRESSES: Home—Santa Monica, CA. Agent—David Black Literary Agency, 156 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Hong Kong Standard, Hong Kong, reporter, 1986–88, reporter in Beijing, 1988–91; New York Times, reporter in New York, NY, 1991–95, Shanghai bureau chief, 1995–2000; writer, 2000–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pulitzer Prize, 1994, for New York Times articles on World Trade Center bombing.

WRITINGS:

South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2004

SIDELIGHTS: Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seth Faison's first book, South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China, tells the story of his years spent wandering the back roads and alleyways of China, first as a student and then as a news reporter. From his arrival in the country in 1984 until his final departure in 2000, he experienced life in the Communist country as few Westerners have. "I wanted to capture the feeling of life in China," Faison related in an interview published on his home page, "as well as the romance and the hardship of being an outsider in Asia. All the years I lived in China, I myself yearned to read a book about life on the ground in China, as it appears to Western eyes. That was the book I decided to try to write myself."

Faison, who shared a Pulitzer prize with other New York Times staff members for his reporting on the attempted 1993 World Trade Center bombing, reveals aspects of the process of his own maturing in the book as well as telling the story of China's long emergence from its Communist-era isolation. "His terse, firsthand description and analysis of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1898," wrote Victor Mallet, in the Financial Times, "is contemporary history at its best." "The uncovering of Chinese secrets—endless because of China's uncertainties about itself—turned out to be the answer to Faison's felt vulnerabilities," explained Los Angeles Times contributor Ross Terrill.

Reviewers recognized that the author's voyage through China is, in many ways, also a voyage of self-discovery. "Faison is a rarity," wrote Susan G. Baird in Library Journal, "a man unafraid to admit that he isn't macho and appreciates the gentler side of human interaction." "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," declared a Publishers Weekly contributor, "his longing for spiritual depth."