Years of letters

When someone calls Brown a laowai (slang for foreigner), he answers by saying he is a laonei, or "insider", his own coinage.

Brown says he witnessed and even participated in China's economic transformation, and it has been constantly refreshing his perception of China.

Born in 1956, Brown grew up dreaming of migrating to Australia at age 8 and wanted to be stationed in Greenland at the US Air Force. Little did he know that the quirks of fate would lead him to Xiamen, a city he had only heard of months before he actually embarked on his journey to Fujian province.

During his years with the US Air Force, he was assigned to Taiwan instead of Greenland in 1976. He became intrigued by the Chinese mainland and wanted to learn more about it.

Brown later went back to the US to complete his master's and doctoral degrees, and opened his own business.

In 1988, he sold his company and traveled with his wife and two sons to Xiamen University, a rare campus in China at the time that provided housing to foreign students with families. The university employed Brown as a teacher of MBA courses in 1989, and in 1992, he became Fujian province's first foreigner to be granted a permanent residency in China.

Brown says he started writing this series of letters and sharing his experiences because his family and friends in the US did not understand his decision to live in Fujian. These recipients helped the publication of the book by sending such letters and photos back to Brown so that he could make copies.