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My attention to ambition is always like a freak function, it makes me feel like a freak.

I think so much of my earlier attention was directed at excelling at the impossible. The gargantuan tasks that were given to me from an early, early age. Going overseas, becoming Someone. The pressure that is placed upon me to succeed because my family had sacrificed everything to get me there. And the older I get the more I realise what exactly they had sacrificed.

But then I was also thinking about the process of naturalization, the process of going from one thing to another. Naturalization naturally has a curve, of learning something that one did not know to knowing something completely. Half of me always still feels like the same small Chinese girl, living in her grandparents flat.

“I tried to carry the weight of the world. But I only have two hands.”

“Get out, pack your things. We’re going somewhere we belong.”

As an adult I’ve realised that I can’t be isolated for long, because isolation was everywhere in my childhood. And so in some ways it feels as if the British side for me is performative, that I am performing it when I’m actually doing it. The performative aspect of race, ethnicity and nationality also always fascinates me, and deeply applies to my life. In some ways it feels like I can never get away from being the Chinese girl. How much of what I am was given to me and told to me in a way that that was what I was. And I believed it for a long time. And being a (good) Chinese girl meant a lot of things, much of that meaning I had to behave. The only way for us to clean ourselves was through work.

I realised that I was being expected to inhabit my old life and my new life at the same time.

Feeling rejected. When I first got to China, it was weird that my family in Britain didn’t really get in touch. They sort-of just left me to it in this wild hinterland. It was always my job to keep the peace, but the adults in my life never offered themselves to me.

Most of the time it felt like I didn’t have a life. And I never believed it when I was loved.

My stepfather beat my mother, and my dad married a woman who could not love me.

Children grow up believing whatever it is you tell them, and for me, I was told that I was unlovable.

It was a strange combination of being overprotected (which meant I didn’t know how I felt) and being underprotected from all that was happening around me.

How to be a bad girl.

Donald Winnicott said there was a true and a false self. That the false self was necessary for society – at least to present it. But there is no way for anyone to be able to present a false self if they had never been allowed to be rebellious, discourteous, whimsical, evil. I had no role models for this because all of the Chinese women, whether on TV or in the media, showed me versions of women who only sacrificed themselves. I was brought up by women who did not take care of themselves.

Women not taking care of themselves is a common theme. And none of these women ever gave the other women in their lives any direction, and in turn they only showed only one thing, which was how a woman had to put her desires last. Always last. Never first. That’s why I decided there had to be an end to the old life, and the beginning of another one. I think at the time, anything less than perfect was not okay, that was what I had been taught. It was made worse when I didn’t know if anything that I did was good enough.

That, coupled with the fact that I always felt like a “freak”, especially because I spoke another language to my parents. Was it possible that I was also “foreignizing” and “othering” my own parents? But I think in a strange or not-so-strange way it also made me hate myself.

I cared too much., and now I care about no one at all.

I had the best conversation with a friend the other day. We talked about how Chinese kids- if they dropped the ball in any way, were seen as selfish. So you didn’t come home for one of the seven holidays in the year where the family are supposed to gather? You’re selfish! You didn’t have a child for us? You’re selfish! You don’t want to take care of my toxic behaviour for the rest of your life? You’re selfish! You’re selfish if you don’t run yourself ragged running after everyone’s needs, which then breeds the type of person that runs after everyone else’s needs. In some ways the original family are the ones who eroded my self-esteem the most. It made for the perfect storm of self-hate and destructive behaviour. So now I’ve just cultivated a personality of “just good enough.”

Then they gave me this British identity, and all the things that that entailed. And now that I live in China, I have to work extra hard to keep the identity intact, or at least to try to ‘preserve’ it.

But doesn’t it make me hate the other culture, that other part of me? How do I reconcile the two? The values of the two will never align, so what if?

One of the generational traumas that I think I must have experienced growing up would have been the trauma passed to me by my grandparents, just by their being so concerned about me.

Being a freak every which way.

I started to hate my life. I was neither Eastern nor was I Western – except I felt VERY Western.

But even when I was a kid I felt this way, when my mother would rake me over the coals to make her feel better. I was expected to have no life, so that my life could just be her.

For me, speaking Chinese had always been presented as something to be proud of.

For a long time, I was a total stickler for rules; I would be the first person to point out someone’s mistake.

But now, by virtue of going abroad, I felt less human than I had done before. And then when I came back to China, my foreignness stood out to me like never before.

And even back in the UK, I was always made to feel less-than for my difference. And then things got more weird for me when almost every weekend I was educated at a house in the Brixton area of London, where my uncle-in-law, who had graduated from Oxford, insistently educated me in English literature and other ways. I remember being a young teen sitting in his and my aunt’s living room or kitchen, and having a sort-of “education.” But I think in some ways it made me addicted to the idea that I had to be high-achieving. But there was also a side to it which was that it felt like my uncle continuously “negged me” – in modern parlance – making me feel as if I was never good enough. And I think that feeling has always consistently stayed with me.

I remember my Shanghai grandfather – part of me is from the south, which I like a lot – looking distressed when someone had cheated him. In fact in the few occasions I had met him, he had always looked distressed. It seemed that all of the early teachers in my life either had a way of distressing me, or becoming distressed themselves.

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.

I never asked to be a cultural bridge for anyone.

I also feel like the ramifications of the history of China has manifested itself in me. Sometimes I feel like a wounded animal, protecting myself in its shell after this many years. The result of not doing things normally within the constraints of that time.

Did they know that, every time I was made to say goodbye to my grandparents, another layer of damage was done? And when my parents divorced another layer was set inside.

I feel like I have been through famine and war and criminality, some of them on the outside and some of them within.

I can list the moments of when I was a six year-old when I felt like my world had ended.

-When one of my grandparents died when I was 16.

-When I got married and my grandpa wasn’t there.

But sometimes I feel as if my family love me too much, like this was something that had affected everything in my life this far, if not wholly affecting my life.

Immigrants don’t know what real success is.

I look at this picture and I see someone trying to smother me with love. I don’t think I was too short off the mark, either.

I think this is the reason I want authentic connection so much.

I guess a normal letter from parents to kids reads like this, but I always thought letters like this was too mature for my age at the time. I realised what my family had for each other was actually contempt.

To work for or love people who has always had such contempt for you must be a soul-killer, if not in the short-term, than definitely long-term. Contempt is at the root of so much scorn and unhappiness between people, but I’ve noticed that the most poisonous thing of all is to stay in the cycle, and also to keep pushing yourself to stay in it for all the wrong reasons.

The Over-indulgence of me at the same time

There was also the fact that I felt I was over-indulged. All of my needs were met and extra, but I still wanted to constantly run away. I constantly felt the pressure to be everything and be nothing, and it was hard to know where I stood.

Was there any surprise that I didn’t end up doing anything at all?

Sometimes it’s okay when everything is broken. I was a bitch my whole life, with no sense of patience.

My aunts could only be producers or coordinators in their job life, because of how much they didn’t ask from themselves.

My grandmother made the world seem unsafe. She was always judgmental, including her second youngest brother who she had left behind in Malaysia, and who had taken a second wife as well as a first.

When a Chinese person – at least in my experience – have thoughts like this one, there’s usually quite a sick justification for it from your parents or people who care for you., and this eventually becomes your inner voice. Maybe it was the only way to have control in a world that was constantly falling apart – that had been constantly falling apart. What did people do when their worlds were falling apart, literally all the time? And on top of that, what happens if you’ve been constantly taught that you were disgusting, or not enough, for some reason or other?

just in my case, I cannot believe the pressure that I was under when I was just 17.