Life Experience First, Publishing Second--From Personal Blog to Book Deal

When did you first realize your popular blog on life in heartland China would convert to a book deal?

Blogging has come a long way in a short time. In 2005, when I started writing, there were far fewer, and the genre was totally amorphous. What I was writing at the time did not feel like something that could turn into a long-form narrative, but I lucked out and ended up with an agent (Will Lippincott) who saw the seeds of memoir.

Will found the blog when another one of his authors forwarded it to him. So the blog entries were not rough drafts of a memoir. They were merely what got the ball rolling. All of this is to say that blogs are great as blogs, but had I written them thinking "Book Deal," I think they would have fallen flat.

Did you ever submit a story or an essay to a literary journal?

Before Kosher Chinese, I had never written anything for submission.  Since I sold the manuscript, I've adapted a few chapters and--with the help of my agent and editor--found placement for them.  

Was being a first time author scary? How much support did you get from peer reviewers, editors, and the agents?

I'm such a neophyte that I don't even know what to be scared of. This has just been a great experience from beginning to end. I'm a teacher, so I have a very supportive community of creative, thoughtful readers around me at all times. I think asking people outside of professional writing circles to give feedback on early drafts was incredibly helpful. But without my agent and editor, my final product would have been garbage.

I'm glad I started with no constraints in mind, and ended with the pros. I think it made for a unique final product.

Did you face any racism during your stay and teaching in China? How did you earn your "Friendship Jew" nickname eventually?

I lived in Guizhou, one of the most diverse provinces in China. It really is a place most Americans have never been exposed to, a place with an incredible variety of religions, languages, and ethnic groups. Despite this, there was nothing like the identity politics we have in the US. People would openly and bluntly say things like "Jews are clever" or "Muslims can't be trusted."  But I found this was mere words; people were always extremely friendly to me, and open-minded once you got past the blanket statements.

As for "Friendship Jew," this was the name my teammates on the Guizhou University basketball team gave me. I was something of a mascot.

Your liberal references to "pussy" in the context of children are provocative and yet filled with compassion and humor. What’s your advice on writing such material without being censored by the editor?

A good question! My editor was very gentle in the ways she helped mold the saucier parts of the book. We never wanted to be prurient, but we did want the story to truly reflect my experiences, and they were full of hilarious moments with students named Pussy and Shitty, and moments of losses of bowel control. The balance was really tough to strike. In the end, the advice I was given, and advice I love, is "trust the reader."

Some people will laugh, others will be upset. And both responses are understandable.

How would you explain "Democracy with Chinese characters" to readers who haven't read your book?

Well, when I teach civics to tenth graders here in Brooklyn, we look at American style democracy, and they get pretty confused.  Electoral college? No direct voting for Senators in the original Constitution? Local governments, state governments, and federal government -- it's far from simple.

China, in some ways, is similar, though their form of democracy is far more limited, and far less done by rule of law. You get a sense of this in Kosher Chinese when there's a local election at the college where I taught. To make a long story short: there are genuine village-level elections in many places in China. And there is hope that this will slowly trickle up. Only time will tell.

I admire that you haven't ventured out to write a book to become famous. You learned through experience, through hardship. Understanding life around you in a world far away from yours is something remarkable that most of us don't have the luxury of experiencing. Or maybe we just 'like' and tweet a bit much these days and have forgotten what it means to hug an old man or sleep under a mat in temperatures unlike ours.

Can you share such experiences (not in the book) that helped fuel your writing process?

There are quite a few memoirs written by Peace Corps volunteers about their experiences.  I think the reason so many of us write ties into your question and into the Peace Corp’s third official goal: to help promote a better understanding of the world’s people among Americans.  My writing process was fueled every day by getting to know Guiyang in all of its beauty and pathos. I hope the book paints a far more three-dimensional picture of the place than readers have gotten from New York Times or CNN coverage of China.

Is there an account of a strong disagreement over a scene or chapter with your editor? If so, would you like to share how it ended up (or not) on page?

Our biggest battle was about the title of the book. I wanted Kosher Dog Meat. The people at Holt thought this was too disgusting and would turn people off. I didn’t really care; I thought the juxtaposition of Kosher and Dog Meat matched the schizophrenia I felt on a daily basis, and also fit the humor and shock of life in Guiyang. 

Anyway, in the end, my editor convinced me that the title would distract readers from the tone of the book — it’s not a gross-out, in your face narrative. I think she’s right that something so bold might be distracting. Still, Kosher Chinese sounds like a cookbook. So I’m not sure if we made the right call.

If there's one thing that you've learnt from writing this book, what is it?

It’s that memoir ain’t history.

Turning years of my life into a two-hundred-page story meant I had to live out huge chunks of my experience. The narrative is real, but so totally incomplete that at times it felt painfully inadequate. I guess this points to a lesson about any kind of writing: what we leave out is as meaningful as what we ultimately decide to include.

In the last scene in your book when you were returning to JFK, when you cried during the in-flight movie, Fantastic Four, when you wanted an old woman next to you offering you chicken foot instead of pulled noodles, when you left me with your last words: "Kosher would never feel the same again", when that happened -- I sighed. I found your book true. It felt real and I could care less if it really happened. What is your advice to memoir writers who want to retain the story truth and not factual truth, something that non-fiction writers struggle to put up with in their projects?

I’ll just say this: Click this.

What’s your advice to emerging writers interested in publishing non-fiction, memoirs, and personal essays in literary magazines?

Emerging authors looking to get placed in literary magazines need a combination of patience, luck, and fantastically polished work.  Even then, without some sort of an in, it can be a tough go!

Finally, if you were to teach Cantonese to Americans or English to Chinese, again, who would you teach and why?

I’ll flip this around: what I really want to do is go back to China and become a student. Chinese is such a gorgeous, challenging language. I’ve gone as far as I can with it as an informal learner; I want to dig in, full time, and really get fluent. 
If I sell 100,000 copies of Kosher Chinese, I’ll quit teaching and move to Beijing to learn.  Here’s hoping!
 

Priyatam Mudivarti writes fiction at late nights, writes complex software code during the day as a freelance software engineer, and documents people's lives taking time-off as a traveling documentary photographer. He has earned his bachelors in Computer Science Engineering and is currently pursuing MFA from Pacific University. He is working on a collection of interlinked short stories and a novella, Yuti, set in India. He lives in Cambridge. He is the Interviews Editor for The Review Review.

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