Finish line... or back to square one?
It's been something like two weeks since I "finished" the manuscript of my book, tentatively titled "True Friendship of a Foreign Lady: The Chinese Odyssey of Sarah Pike Conger."
I use quotation marks because a wise writer is as superstitious as the parents of a Chinese baby: if you dress the boy as a girl, the evil spirits will leave him alone. But in all the basic ways, the beam and girder ways (just not the wallpaper and draperies ways) the manuscript of my story of the friendship of two women from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum is complete. Let the evil spirits do what they will. Anyway, now for the hard part!
What is my book about? It follows the friendship, from 1898 to 1908, of Sarah Pike Conger, wife of the American envoy to Beijing, and the Empress Dowager Cixi, before and after one of the greatest disasters to ever befall relations between China and the West, the Boxer Uprising of summer 1900. The idea came to me as I strolled through the imperial Summer Palace outside Beijing last year with the Empress Dowager's great-nephew, Na Genzheng. He told me about the human side of this woman whom history has consigned to the Grand Guignol hall of infame. I was also stunned by the rather hideous gifts, still on display at the Palace, given by foreign ministers' wives to the Empress Dowage, she who owned some of the most beautiful porcelains, bronzes, embroideries, furniture and other treasures on the face of the earth. A Qianlong vase compared to a tchochki in which two German sailor boys smilingly tote a receptacle made of lurid millifiore glass... no, these women had no idea what sort of culture they were bringing their "gifts" to, or who the dowager herself was. None of them ever did except for Sarah Pike Conger.
And back to the hard part.... finishing. Yes, there is plenty to do. Aside fromas many empty interstices to fill as the webwork of a Gothic cathedral, I still have to prepare the manuscript for submission to my publisher, Hong Kong University Press, in May. This means verifying all the several hundred foot notes, putting them in the correct format, lifting them out of the sentences where they've grown accustomed to dwelling these past few years and into ordered beds at the rear of the book. I have to select and then get permission to use a variety of photographs many of which are scattered all over the world, and hope I don't have to pay too much (or at all). Then, when I turn it all in, I sit back and wait for the review committee to do their work, and hope a work in which I've invested sweat, tears and cash will survive the process in the form in which I sent it. If all goes well, the book is to come out in 2012, just in time for the one hundredth anniversary of the end of the Qing dynasty.
I had my great day two weeks ago of typing "THE END." Now I get to rewind the platen back to "THE BEGINNING" and start the real work of getting a manuscript off neat and tidy to the school known as the outside world. All by May 2010. Good thing I don't drink!
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Belle Yang says:
Congratulations
on putting in the last period. I think this moment is the most precious, because it is a private little party with solely with you and the book manuscript in attendance, with no committees to applaud or nay say.
What an interesting topic, and I am always amazed by writers who can turn out a full ms. in a year's time.
I don't think the Qing Dynasty were particularly tasteful if you look at the clashing colors the Qings adopted in their architecture and the later porcelains. To this Han Chinese, the Qings, after nearly 400 years, were still yahoos from the steppes ;)
Wishing you a smooth journey until publication.
Grant Hayter-Menzies says:
Manchu and Han
Thanks, Belle.
The part of me that is fascinated by how foreigners learn to function (or not) in a culture not their own - and the Manchus were certainly foreigners in China, though that gets complicated at the family unit and ethnicity levels - is the part that loves the Qing period. But as a lover of the Ming and Song and Tang, I'm with you: they were about as good as it gets.
The moment of putting in the last period was particularly precious to me, and bittersweet, because I worked doubly hard - staying up late, working weekends, and on my commute - to get the MS. into some semblance of shape to print off and place in the hands of Sarah Conger's granddaughter, a wonderful woman who had her 106th birthday in June, who had helped me with her memories and her resemblance to her grandmother: it was just as if I were sitting with the charming Mrs. Conger. I was to see her again on August 14th, the day her parents met following the end of the Boxer Uprising (her father in the relief forces, her mother one of the trapped foreigners). Her granddaughter told me in Boston last week that her grandmother tried to hold out for our visit. Peacefully, Mrs. Jewell passed on to the Yellow Springs on August 2nd, two days before I set that final period. I have dedicated the book to her memory, even as the book itself is dedicated to that of her amazing grandmother Sarah Conger.
Grant Hayter-Menzies
Belle Yang says:
I tend to look at history
through two different perspectives. I have to stop and make real shifts in my brain to see from the American to the Chinese and the reverse. If I have my Chinese goggles on, the Boxer Rebellion was just a few months ago, and if I wear the American goggle, the invasion of China by the eight countries was time immemorial.
I will read your book when it comes out.