Why I Write
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 09:11
Written by JFK Miller

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In this new series of Web exclusives we talk to authors writing in or about the Middle Kingdom about their literary habits, preferences and peculiarities and examine the question at the heart of being an author – why they write

Jeff Wasserstrom's latest book, Global Shanghai, an historical journey through the last 150 years of China's largest city seen through 25 year intervals, frames today's Shanghai in a chronological perspective. The China Beat writer and academic historian's next book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, is out early next year.

Why I write
For a lot of reasons. Because I have to in order to meet a work-related obligation: there’s often a committee report due, an Editorial Foreword that’s needed for a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, a letter of recommendation that has to be sent in, and so on. Sometimes, I write because I feel there’s something that needs to be said about China, either to shed light on a new subject or counteract what I see as a misleading approach to it in a news story or opinion piece. Occasionally, I write for money (getting paid for a review or commentary is still enough of a novelty to get me excited when I see the check). And sometimes, I even write for fun.

Do you write every day? If so, how many hours?
No. I spend some time at a keyboard just about every day, but there are days when all I am doing is responding to e-mails or pulling together materials for a classroom lecture. As for what I think of as real 'writing,' one week, I’ll do none, then the next I’ll spend 30 hours on a project. It varies widely.

Worst source of distraction?
E-mail.

Best source of inspiration?
Reading, conversation, travel.

How often do you get writers' block/doubt your own ability?
Luckily, I don’t often grapple with writer’s block. Unluckily, I often worry that what I’m writing isn’t flowing as well as it should.

WHY I WRITE
Rachel Dewoskin
Catherine Sampson
Paul French
Jeff Wasserstrom
Lynn Pan
Zhang Lijia
Adam Williams
Frances Wood
Sarah Brennan
Linda Jaivin
Charles Cumming
Graham Earnshaw
Mishi Saran

Contemporary writer in any medium who you never miss?
Pankaj Mishra. There are other people I try to read whenever they publish something new. In the China field, for example, I try to keep up with Geremie Barmé (not easy, given how prolific he is!), and I’ve never been disappointed by anything Evan Osnos has done for The New Yorker.  I always learn something new (about the world or just about language) from book reviews by Perry Anderson, and the same goes for those of Pico Iyer. But Pankaj still stands out. I loved his first novel, The Romantics, and all the short pieces of his I’ve seen on topics ranging from contemporary Chinese writers to nineteenth century European novelists, from U.S. policy toward Pakistan to the allure of Western popular music when he was growing up in India. He’s the one person for whom I’ve set up a 'Google Alert' account, so that I’d get an automatic e-mail telling me whenever he had something new come out.  (I ended up doing away with that, incidentally, as I kept getting messages about other Pankaj Mishras, who were mentioned in news stories about disaster relief, had written about cricket and so on — turns out, he just doesn’t have a very unusual name.)

Favorite Chinese writer?
Lu Xun.

Best book about China?
An impossible question to answer, but here are some of the best things I’ve read recently (which is another way of saying the ones I wish I’d written): Peter Hessler’s Country Driving (I devoured an advance copy recently on a flight to and from Germany — it’s the best thing he’s done so far, which is saying a lot); Lynn Pan’s Shanghai Style (a beautiful book without a wasted word or image in it); Henrietta Harrison’s The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857-1942 (provides a fresh look at some of the major shifts in modern Chinese history, seen through the eyes of a compulsive keeper of journals); and Susan Mann’s The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (the work of a leading historian of China at the top of her game who takes stylistic risks that pay off). By the wish-I’d-written-that criterion, Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang might be my all-time top China book; I loved it when I was assigned to read it in the first Chinese history course I ever took, and I’ve always looked for excuses to assign it to my classes (and never regretted putting it on a syllabus).

Favorite book?
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, one of the only things I re-read occasionally (too many new things to read). Recent books unrelated to China that have bowled me over include Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and Rory Stewart’s The Place in Between…bold works that blur the lines between genres and will change the way I write.

Favorite writer?
Mark Twain.

The book you know you should have read but haven't?
The Gulag Archipelago.

You look back at the first thing you had published and think...
I’m amazed that it still gets cited. It’s a study of resistance to the 'one-child family' policy. I wrote at the end of my first year in graduate school. I sent it to the journal Modern China, and they accepted it right away. Then it started getting cited and it was even excerpted and used in a reader on demography that was assigned to introductory classes. Needless to say, it left me with totally unrealistic expectations about how my publishing career would work from that point on. I would have plenty of essays I quite liked get rejected, or almost equally as distressingly, appear, but then be completely ignored.

What are you working on now and when is it out?
I’m very glad you asked. I just sent in the manuscript of a new book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, which will come out early in 2010 and be part of a series that Oxford University Press is doing (all the works in it have the same subtitle). It is a very short book in a question and answer format. In it, I try to give concise, sensible, and I hope engagingly written replies to the sorts of queries I get after giving public talks. Why is China still governed by a Communist Party, after so many other similar regimes have fallen? Is Chinese nationalism something to worry about? Why is China holding an Expo so soon after hosting an Olympics? Those sorts of things.

It’s aimed at general readers not fellow academics, and I see it as the kind of thing that would be ideal to pick up at the airport bookstore en route to China for the first time, or that an expat might want send to a brother or sister about to come over to visit as a present. It has a lot on sources of misunderstanding between the U.S. and China, as that’s something I’ve thought a lot about and something that should concern people who are neither American nor Chinese, given how important the relationship between the two countries has become. (Too bad it won’t be out in time for someone to suggest that Obama read it before heading to China!). I won’t brag about the text, as that would be unseemly, but I can say it has a very eye-catching cover (since I didn’t come up with that) and will be available from the start in an affordable paperback edition (about $11 from Amazon).

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