SeligmanOnline          Writing

Most of my published work has something to do with China. Since the early days of China's opening to the West, I've written many articles about doing business there. I've also written books on Chinese culture, teamed up on phrase books for travelers to China and a Chinese cookbook, and am currently writing about the early Chinese experience in the United States.

 

The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, a compendium of simple, healthy recipes from the Chinese countryside, has been published by Earnshaw Books. Sasha Gong and I have collected the recipes that the 17 million young, privileged urbanites who were “sent down” to the countryside learned from the peasants during China’s chaotic Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976, and added stories, evocative illustrations and descriptive material. Read all about the book here! Buy the book from Amazon.com here!

Three Tough Chinamen.  Nineteenth century Chinese immigrants to America, the Moy brothers - Jin Kee, Jin Mun and Jin Fuey, crossed lines and broke barriers. Tough men whose lives were hemmed in by prejudice and restrictive laws, they were scrappy and ambitious. In an era when Chinese were excluded from America’s shores and most already in the U.S. kept their heads down, they stood up and fought for their countrymen, using all means available to get ahead, up to and including committing petty crimes and, in the case of one brother, heinous ones. This is a collection of their stories about outwitting laws that mandated that Chinese accept third-class status if they desired even a small share in the American dream. Three Tough Chinamen  is slated to be published by Earnshaw Books in the Fall of 2012.  Click on the book cover at right to view the book's website. An an excerpt about Moy Jin Kee entitled "The Hoosier Mandarin" was published in the Fall, 2011 edition of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, the quarterly magazine of the Indiana Historical Society. Click on the magazine's cover at left to read it. The book's website can be seen here.

"The Night New York's Chinese Went Out for Jews." I wrote an article on an improbable coming together of New York's Chinese and Jewish communities in 1903 that appeared in the September, 2011 edition of in China Heritage Quarterly, an e-journal of recent developments and scholarship in areas related to China's heritage, culture, history and society. You can read it here. In honor of the Year of the Rabbit, the Jewish Daily Forward  (no longer a daily, and no longer published in Yiddish, but still alive and kicking in print and online) ran a condensed version of it, which you can read here.

Dealing With the Chinese and Chinese Business Etiquette.. My first effort at explaining the Chinese to foreigners, Dealing With the Chinese, did pretty well in the marketplace, despite being published just a month before the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. A British edition came out a year later. Chinese Business Etiquette, published in 1999, is the heir to Dealing With the Chinese. I revisited the subject after three years back in China, because so much had changed and my understanding had deepened. You can buy it on Amazon, or read some of the reviews, here if you like.

There's so much China fever in Seoul these days that Chinese Business Etiquette got its own Korean edition in 2006! The title translates loosely as "Catch Flies with Honey, Not Vinegar." Why a people who have shared deep cultural ties and a border with China for thousands of years feel the need for instruction in matters like "face" is unclear to me, but far be it from me to argue with the extra income. The Korean version was joined by a Czech language edition in 2008.

Chinese at a Glance. I wrote this phrase book for travelers with I-chuan Chen back in 1984, and it has been published three times: in 1985, in 2001 and again in 2006. Amazingly, fully a third of the book needed updating when we tackled it the second time - and this is a language book! Among the things that exist in China that had not been there a quarter of a century ago: Western breakfasts, forms of address like "Mrs." and "Miss," tipping, hailing taxis, facials, discos, karaoke, CDs and DVDs, e-mail and Internet cafés. The latest edition is available on Amazon here.