Last Updated on July 2, 2026 by Christian Adams
Christian Adams (b. 1968, Chicago, IL) is an American author, editor, and musician, and the sole proprietor of Black Sunshine Media Group. Born and raised in suburban Chicago, Adams has lived in San Francisco and Taipei, and now lives in the Philippines.
Adams’ first non-fiction work, The Lazy Bastard Guide to Mandarin, was published in 2012 by International Publications Media Group, New York.
In 2024, he published the first two books of the four-book Lunar New Years series: Year of the Rat and Years of the Ox & Tiger. In May 2025, he published Year of the Rabbit.
Year of the Dragon & Everything After was released on September 6, 2025, marking the conclusion of the series.
Musical Background
Adams plays guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards (listed in order of proficiency). He has working but not sophisticated knowledge of music theory and very poor reading skills except for rhythm notation, the result of his background in percussion. Of his music theory chops, Adams says, “I can count like a champion, but I use the shape and direction of the notes to determine if the melody is going up or down. I only think of notes when dealing with chords.”
Adams started on drums in 1975 and played in a few high school bands. From 1988 through 2007, he played in a series of indie rock bands that specialized in various forms of hard rock-adjacent music. “My first few bands were terrible,” Adams says. He is notable for co-founding and leading bands such as Golden Tones, Henry Miller Sextet, and Aztec Hearts. [See his complete discography.]
“Across the lifespan of several bands and cities, we wrote hundreds of songs, practiced in some of the funkiest rooms on the planet, recorded albums in top-tier pro studios with solid engineers, and at home on 4-track and 8-track machines. We played hundreds of shows, sometimes out of town, sold T-shirts, built promo kits and took pro photos. We flirted with a few indie labels and gained some traction with local radio and national media, but none of those bands were anywhere close to commercially successful by any measure of the ‘successful metric’ except we were good at what we did.”
– Christian Adams on his music career
Since 2008, Adams continued to write and record music at home, still using a “band name” for his work, but remained mentally retired from music. In 2012, he “came out of retirement” to perform a solo show in Taipei, Taiwan; and again in 2017, playing solo and with multiple outfits throughout the year. After another break, I reconnected with my old collaborator, Ron Kwasman, and released a new Golden Tones album in 2023.
Disclaimer & Disclosure
Adams says that he doesn’t claim any proficiency or appeal, i.e., “I’m not saying I’m any good.” However, at times, depending on his practice routine, Adams was more than competent on guitar, could hold his own on bass, and frequently filled in on drums at open mic nights in Taipei. They called him an “angry drummer.” Anyway, there were long stretches of time between 2008 and 2012 that Adams hardly played guitar, adding, I’m currently in another dry spell, as I haven’t played any instrument since…2024? My callouses have faded away.”
Bibliography
Quick links to Christian’s self-published work.
Year of the Rat
Book 1: Lunar New Years
Christian Adams’ debut memoir of expat life in Taiwan—late nights, neon streets, reckless choices, and the restless pursuit of freedom. If you’ve ever dreamed of starting over—or wondered what it costs—the Lunar New Years series tells the story, one year at a time. Year of the Rat is the most brutally honest account of expat life in a generation—funny, reckless, and impossible to put down.
Years of the Ox & Tiger
Book 2: Lunar New Years
Book 2 captures the chaos of expat life—discipline, rebellion, burnout, and the cost of living without limits. When rebellion collides with routine, chaos comes due. Adams evokes the high-wire tension between rebellion and burnout with a voice as sharp as broken glass and just as unforgettable. A fearless chronicle of ambition and burnout—equal parts Hunter S. Thompson energy and Hemingway grit for the 21st century.
Year of the Rabbit
Book 3: Lunar New Years
Love, fatigue, and fragile trust—what happens when restlessness runs headlong into responsibility. What does it mean to reinvent yourself abroad? Rarely has love, fatigue, and the ache of belonging been rendered with such clarity—this is a memoir at its most unsparing. A masterstroke of candor and cultural critique—Adams turns expat fatigue and fragile love into a story of astonishing resonance.
Year of the Dragon & Everything After
Book 4: Lunar New Years
Addiction, loyalty, and love in the fire of consequence—the unflinching conclusion to a restless journey. The final Lunar New Years memoir—Christian Adams confronts addiction, loyalty, and love in a story of reckoning and renewal. A searing finale—unflinching, addictive, and devastatingly human. The Lunar New Years series ends as one of the great expat memoirs of our time.
Digital Media
In addition to his work as an independent author and editor, Adams has a deep background in online content creation, founding Black Sunshine Media in 2012. The story is told in first-person.
2012: Humble Beginnings of Black Sunshine Media by Christian Adams
I initially started this website as a repository for the music I’ve made since the early 1990s, and to promote my first book, The Lazy Bastard Guide to Mandarin: An Abridged Corpus of Axioms, Vocabulary and Their Purported Meanings (2012, IPMG, New York). When the book was released, the publisher disappeared, leaving me with an Amazon link to the ebook, a contract not worth the PDF it was printed from, and a glorified WordPress blog with nothing to promote.
From decoding the Asian bar scene to buying drugs in night markets, The Lazy Bastard Guide to Mandarin goes where no other phrasebook has been—far beyond the most basic tourist scenarios of hotels and Buddhist temples. A non-fiction narrative satirizing certain phrasebooks (Lonely Planet, Berlitz, The Rough Guide to…, etc.), offering an irreverent perspective on language in the modern age and a useful tool for current and potential expatriates.
For the next year or so, I used BSM to showcase the artwork, writing, and photography of my friends in Taipei, but those friends also evaporated into the ether, too. It didn’t bother me because I used the site to hone my writing skills and talk about whatever I wanted. With no audience, there was no pressure to perform. With nobody helping me on the technical side, I ignored all the “best practices” of blogging and publishing. It was a free-for-all.
2015: The 1001 Albums Quest and Hiatus
Several years passed. In early 2015, I uncharacteristically got excited about a new project based on a coffee table book called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I thought the whole thing was preposterous, especially the idea that you needed to hear anything before you died. A friend and I were joking around, and he said, “You should write a rebuttal for BSM.” I shrugged it off, but a few days later, I thought, “You know what? I should write a rebuttal.”
The 1001 albums quest started with a simple premise. I would sit down and listen to every album on the list and make a judgment call for each one: Is this a must-hear album? And, of course, I’d write a little review or a reaction to each record. The albums were grouped in years (of release), which I reorganized into two-year categories (e.g., 1967–1968).
It took six months to get through albums from 1955 to 1992, somewhere around 660 albums, when I hit a wall. After publishing 13 essays, I wasn’t listening to entire albums anymore. In many cases, I’d already heard the album, so it was simply a matter of talking about the record. Domestic issues popped up, and I abandoned the project in August 2015.
BSM went on hiatus while I dealt with life. I posted something once or twice a year. The site was always in my mind, but I had plenty of other things to worry about.
2019: The Portfolio Revival
In 2019, I left Taiwan to live in Metro Manila with my wife and son, but I struggled to find full-time work (as a freelance writer and editor). Suddenly, Black Sunshine Media had a purpose again. This time, as an online portfolio of my previous and current work. It was a fairly effective marketing tool because I found plenty of freelance work within a few months. One of those freelance gigs became a full-time gig in 2020, so I didn’t need BSM (or a portfolio) for the time being, so once again, I abandoned the website and focused on giving 100% to the start-up.
Four years went by. I posted about the revival of an old musical project, Golden Tones, once or twice. Now and then, I’d do some editing on the portfolio material.
2024: Humbled Again and a Fresh Start
Life has a way of humbling us. In September 2024, my entire department was terminated by the company. Zero notice. One-month severance pay. Thanks for your service. See ya.
Not entirely caught off guard, it’s a good thing I socked away some money for a rainy day because it started raining. At a certain age, over 50, you may realize that a big chunk of your life is behind you. And if there are things you’d like to do while you’re still on the ball, your windows of opportunity are small, and they close quickly.
There were two items on my so-called bucket list. First, publish the books I’ve been writing since 2008. I had five or six books’ worth of material just sitting on my hard drive. Likewise, I wanted to learn the ins and outs of self-publishing.
Second, I wanted to work on BSM to (a) promote my books and (b) write about whatever I wanted again. It had been so long since I wrote anything that wasn’t work-related.
2026 and Beyond
To be continued.