Posting my proposal here because I don’t know what else to do with it.
— Title: a marketing driven title and subtitle that will tell prospective editors what your book is all about.
Unfinished Business OR Tearing Down Idols: A Chinese Girl’s Guide to Rebellion – a journey through a broken heart, the pain of difference, the hinterland of race, class, and intersectional feminism
— Summary and Pitch: Briefly describe your project, indicating what makes it unique and compelling. Imagine this is the jacket flap copy of your eventual book. (One to two paragraphs)
Alice Xin Liu was born in China in 1986, eight years after the reform and opening up, which heralded a period of prosperity in China. Alice missed her parents when they immigrated to London in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and from the ages of 4 to seven she lived with her grandparents in Beijing. She spent years in the United Kingdom going to school and then university, getting back to Beijing in the summers. After getting her 2:1 English degree from Durham University in 2007 she returned to China to work at That’s Beijing (now The Beijinger) for a few months before she was recruited to work at the Guardian’s Beijing office. At the Guardian Beijing office she worked on some of the major stories of the day, including the Beijing 2008 Olympics and the Wenchuan earthquake in 2012, which killed over 69,000 people.
She turned her hand to literary translation when asked to choose between going to the Wenchuan earthquake as it was happening or a literary translation conference jointly held by Penguin the publishing house, and the Administration for Press and Publications of the Chinese government. She chose the latter and it has in some way dictated the trajectory of her path, and since her first book publication in 2015 she has continued to publish two more books of translation, making the total a total of three books. She has also published her writing in Granta, n+1, Asymptote, the Guardian, Asia Times Online, and other places.
— “The Book”: A general overview of the project and why this would interest readers. This would form the meat of the proposal. Make sure to address the following: explain your vision of the book, why the book will be important and offer something new to readers, where it would fit in the bookstore (e.g., in History or General Non-Fiction). This section is key to setting up the context for what follows, represents the heart of the proposal and tends to run anywhere from 5-10 pages. Note that editors always want books to present an argument and point of view as publicity results from having a “take” on an issue.
I’m sick of the “poor little China girl” narrative, which I tend to think of as a white man’s perspective on the China issue. I feel like a lot of China memoirs fall into two distinct categories, the “poor little China girl” category, or one like Karoline Kan’s Under Red Skies (2019), a factual and true account of growing up in China under the one child policy. While these things are true of me—I was also born under the One Child Policy—I don’t, or I should say, no longer operate from this place. I have felt neither completely Chinese nor completely British, instead I’ve always been told that I am the one thing or the other. It wasn’t so much that my life is a struggle between the Individualism of the West and the Collectivism of the East, it was that I was always told that this was the way. From the East, a collective system and culture stemming from a Chinese upbringing, and from the West, which includes my education and formative years, on how to live in an individualistic way. At first I thought I had to reconcile the two, and I asked many writers who had been through this process, including Maria Tumarkin, the author of Motherland, what she had felt. Tumarkin said she had spent her life trying to reconcile the two, and that it was reconcilable. but I have a different opinion—I don’t think you can ever reconcile the two because they are essentially completely and competing ideologies, but I have always been told to be good and not bad, and for some reason the bad was associated with the Western world. And now, being back in the country where I was born, it feels as if things have taken a 360 degree turn—I am no longer interested in being good, whatever being a “good Chinese girl” means. So never knowing what kind-of person I am and have been, I’ve had to wade through all of the conditioning to find out. Having lived in Beijing, the place of my birth and life 0-7, since 2007, and reached the age of 35, I’ve come to a way of living in Beijing that embodies all of the facets of myself and the “otherness” that is in me, which is seen by different individuals depending on which side of the divide they are on.
There is also a different edge to all of this. When growing up, I believed that being a Chinese girl was, honestly, one of the most terrible things to be. Even though it was synonymous with being the “good girl,” as it was taught to me and as I was socialized, and as it was something I believed for a long time, it is kind-of the inverse of what I’ve learned since my return to the country: My self-worth became detached from achievement. I’ve found that growing up in a Chinese family to be inherently patriarchal: Everything functioned according to a certain set of rules, and obeying those rules. There is a Chinese saying for raising children that I’ve encountered recently, and it’s “never be the tallest tree,” a saying that has been reiterated by many of the Chinese friends I’ve had and still have today. The experiences I have had since coming back to Beijing, for the last fourteen years, has been transformative for my life. I’ve been able to bring together both the individualism which I feel is an essential part of who I am, and find something new within it, staking out an individuality and voice all of my own.
In 2017 I started to podcast with Joanna Chiu (formerly of the AFP in Beijing) for the NüVoices Network and the earlier episodes contained some harrowing topics for me including rape and sexual assault. These episodes were never broadcasted since they were too sensitive and formatted incorrectly, but they started a chain of events where I wanted to speak my truth and also encourage others to do the same. After doing all of this soul-searching, I feel as if my book would definitely have to fit under Memoir, with chapters that talk about me being born in Beijing, China, leaving for England when I was seven, living with my parents, spending Christmases at a British family who were the in-laws of my aunt, and then growing up in a British school and then university. I would separate these into chapters.
–Competitive/Comparable Books. One- two pages. List books yours will be in the tradition of and those already out there that may be considered competitive. A few paragraphs to a page. Over 200,000 trade books are published every year. How does your book stand out, or significantly add to or alter the popular understanding compared to existing books on the same subject? How is it similar in approach to other books that have done very well, even if those other books tackle different subject entirely.
Probably the closest I can come to is Leslie T. Chung’s Factory Girls, because Chang weaves both the history of China and her personal story of going back to explore her roots, in the writer’s book of narrative non-fiction. However my memoir would be quite different because it is more of a personal memoir than a journalistic piece of work, mostly because I don’t work as a journalist covering China. I also have little interest in covering topical or political issues that would be interesting for a journalist. I am more interested in covering the emotional journey and what is going on inside of me. I think existing memoirs right now focus overly on the political narratives to come out of China, as well as policies that affect the writers, such as the One Child Policy, which began in 1989. This is not something that I really want to focus on, because in some ways it centers on a particularly news-centric angle
–Audience: One or two paragraphs. Identify and define the self-selecting, core audience who will definitely review, publicize, and buy your book, and why. Is there a secondary or crossover audience for your book?
Feminist groups. I would pitch the book to Verso Books.
Any publishers that have a political or left-leaning audience
I was and still am part of a feminist group formed in Beijing by Joanna Chiu, who worked at AFP at the time and who is now a senior journalist at the Toronto Star, author of the book China Unbound.
Being friends with journalists over the years means that I have a wide network of friends who are journalists or correspondents, for example those working at NPR, Bloomberg, The Daily Telegraph and the Washington Post, Toronto Star, and they would be happy to promote the book.
The queer community
–Special Marketing and Promotional Opportunities: One or two paragraphs. Is there something about your position or background that will help a publisher in selling your book? For example, do you give speeches and/or appear in the media?
I do give speeches, but mostly to closed networks such as universities and events like the Beijing Women’s Network. I also have connections to New York-based SupChina.com, and I would be looking forwards to giving talk at organisations such as the Asian Americans Writers’ Workshop (AAWW). The NüVoices Network was created in 2018 by Joanna Chiu, Rachel Morarjee, Dominique Fong, Lijia Zhang, Christina Larson, Sophie Lu, Te-Ping Chen, Chenni Xu, Katie Stallard, and Isabella Steger. The idea was to create a group of women writers and journalists from China who would be able to cover up what was missing in writing about the China-sphere, which seemed to be dominated mostly by writing by white, male journalists and writers.
Are you affiliated with an organization that plans to purchase and/or promote your book?
The NuVoices Collective (link) would help.
— Research and Delivery: One or two paragraphs. How long it will take you to complete the book, and how long you expect it to be. Indicate whether the book will include photos or illustrations, and if so, how many.
I’ve done the calculations and the total amount of writing should take about 25 weeks, however I would like there to be weekends and Christmas and New Year’s, as well as Chinese New Year, to ensure that the writing is actually successful. So the total would be longer.
Since it is a memoir the book will include photos.
— A Table of Contents: 10 pages or so. Dedicate about a page to describing what you plan to cover in each chapter. This represents the narrative arc of the book. Each chapter should build on the one before.
| Chapter one | Childhood |
| Chapter two | Emigration |
| Chapter three | Teen years |
| Chapter four | Going to University |
| Chapter five | Summers spent in China |
| Chapter six | After University- wondering what to do |
| Chapter seven | Wandering around Romania and Moldova, and flying back to China |
| Chapter eight | In Beijing after all those years, exploring a “new” city |
| Chapter nine | Working at the Guardian in Beijing, and becoming a literary translator |
| Chapter ten | Working as a literary translator, Marriage |
| Chapter eleven | Coming back to China |
| Chapter twelve | Sorting out the patchwork of my family |
| Chapter thirteen | What is the right place for me to be? |
| Chapter fourteen | China – the safest place to be |
| Chapter fifteen | Becoming stronger than before Creating one world of my own |
Attached in email.