By Laura Smyth, Publisher
Thimbleberry Press, LLC
Every new enterprise
starts with a (hopefully) good idea. Ours started with two.
First, to create a
book documenting the experiences of daughters adopted from China on return
visits or heritage tours. Second, since we were starting at zero and wanted to
create a hard cover, full-color book we thought ÒLetÕs ask China to print the
book for us.Ó
Seems simple enough, right? What world government wouldnÕt jump at such an opportunity? I canÕt offer you our business plan as a step-by-step model for starting a publishing company, but our experience does illustrate what can happen if your eyes, mind, and heart stay open to the possibilities around you.
My partners and I decided the inaugural project for our new company, Thimbleberry Press, LLC, would be a sort of memory book based on the experiences of daughters adopted from China returning to visit that country on heritage tours. This kernel of an idea grew to become The DragonÕs Daughters Return. The idea was first discussed sitting around the kitchen table in the summerhouse my husband and I had recently purchased in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was August, 2006, our friend and adoptive parent, Virginia Cornue, was visiting from our common hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Virginia and her daughter Mei Ming had just returned from a heritage tour through northern China sponsored by the Chinese government. While on this tour Virginia had the brainstorm for our book-to-be. She floated the idea with other families on the trip to enlist their participation, and since she is not only an adoptive parent but also a China scholar who had spent a great deal of time in China in the 1990s researching her doctoral dissertation, Virginia met with key representatives while in Beijing. She offered them a handwritten-at-2:00 a.m. proposal, the promise of an experienced designer (me) and the assurance that weÕd work everything else out. It was in the best sense of the word a true handshake deal, and as it turned out, it was also the very best way to make a book with China.
That summer as the three of us sat in my kitchen in Michigan, we decided as a team to simply create the book and the company and to believe we would find the means to make both a reality. This is where blind faith came in handy. We assumed a kind of Òif you do it, it will happenÓ philosophy. With my years of book design experience I knew what I wanted from a creative point of view, but I also knew how expensive this book would be to print, bind, ship and distribute. Our limited capital couldnÕt come close to meeting the need. So, without giving up our day jobs, Virginia and I spent evenings and weekends creating the book that we had no assurance would ever see the light of day. Part of doing this was reconciling ourselves to the idea that all we might have to show for our efforts was the joy of the collaborative process. Without sounding like a defeatist, because IÕm not, itÕs important to have several measures of success for yourself. The first and most important being to create what you want to put out into the world. The second, to find a way to get that work out into that wider world. We knew we could achieve the first, we trusted to China that we would achieve the second.
And the collaborative partnership that Virginia and I were able to create really was a blast. Back in New Jersey, after our summer on the Keweenaw Peninsula, we spent every weekend for nearly three months with our heads together over bits of manuscript Virginia had written and that I would help edit, over electronic photographs sent in by contributing families, and the beautiful calligraphy provided almost on demand by Li Yajing, our calligrapher. Even the bookÕs cover was a fastpaced collaboration with our illustrator, Lisa Lorms. Lisa managed to take VirginiaÕs vision of girls riding a dragon back to China and give it the beauty, humor, and charm we had hoped for.
Section by section we fleshed out the shape of the book. Taking bits of conversation over tea and developing them into topics for sidebars, shaping and reshaping the form of the book, adding and subtractingÉbut mostly addingÉright up to the end. And when we found our necks cramping or backsides going numb, the cry of Òfeet upÓ would go out. Many a Sunday afternoon our daughters would stand in my living room looking down in adolescent humiliation at their mothers lying flat on their backs on the living room rug with bent knees, feet resting on the sofa. (I highly recommend assuming this position by-the-way to help your creative process, whatever your process may be. Also to humiliate any teenagers you might have around the house, just for fun.)
After thirteen years of designing and producing books for the publishing industry in the New York area, I can honestly say this was the most fun I ever had making a book. As a freelance designer, the process I had grown accustomed to was: 1) receive electronic manuscript; 2) receive digital and print photography and illustration to prep for layout; 3) create a new design template to someone elseÕs specifications and vision; 4) format type and create page designs to meet the marketing needs of the publisher who hired me. DonÕt misunderstand me, there is creativity in the process and it is always satisfying to create the best finished product you can with the materials provided, but it is yeomanÕs work for the most part. (For you writers out there, think of it as writing within a form on a set topic—not easy, but sometimes it works well.) And the publisherÕs marketing department often plays an oversized role in determining what ÒproductÓ will sell the best, rather than a creative collaboration to produce the best book the editors, illustrators, photographers and designers can create for a marketing department to sell. Certainly, every book isnÕt made this way, but too many are.
We took our idea, and all the photos, stories, and insights that the adoptive families contributed to this project, and crafted them into a book that can broaden a readerÕs understanding of adoption, especially adoption from China, as well as the life and culture of China today. In other words, just what we set out to do.
The whole time we were making our book, the dialogue with China continued through the helpful mediation of Dr. Jianjun (Jim) Wang, a man dedicated to education and cultural exchange. Jim was instrumental in creating the heritage tours for children adopted from China and he wholeheartedly supported the idea of the book when Virginia initially explained it to him. He acted as our intermediary with the Cultural and Education Department of China Overseas Exchanges Association (COEA)—the department that ultimately printed, bound and shipped the books to us.
A number of cultural specifics in how negotiations between parties (China and the rest) occur enabled our once-in-a-lifetime collaboration. These differences included old school ties and friendship, guanxi (obligatory relationships), the meaning and processes of contracts, the historically high value placed on education in China, contemporary socialist high valuation of girls and women, and historical valuation of family.
Because in China, a contract is an agreement to begin negotiating, rather than a signed and sealed deal (the Western idea of you do your part, IÕll do mine and weÕre done), Thimbleberry Press started off exactly right with a handshake agreement and weÕll work it out approach. Second, because education, and the higher a degree the better, is such a strong value in China, VirginiaÕs doctoral degree and her long-term relationship with China as a scholar and parent were both extremely helpful in assuring key leaders that Thimbleberry Press was not going to produce a slam China book. Nor were we going to make a puff piece. To my astonishment, not one word was edited by anyone on the Chinese side of this partnership—a level of trust I have never experienced before in making a book.
And then there were the old school classmate ties, both Jim WangÕs ties with a key leader in COEA, and tangentially JimÕs ties with Virginia (both Jim and Virginia had done doctoral work at Rutgers that overlapped in time). Guanxi also came into play. Westerners understand guanxi as connections—you do me a favor and I return it some day and weÕre even. Guanxi is a much more complex web in which the exchange of help or information actually creates a deep and abiding relationship—even friendship—that lasts a lifetime. Jim and his COEA schoolmateÕs guanxi were key factors in making our book.
Here in the states, Jim was a volunteer leader in a growing nationwide network of weekend China schools—places where families from China could take their kids to learn Chinese and they themselves could have a little bit of native language conversation once a week. Jim was a biochemist by training and profession, but he was an educator and creator by avocation. And it was at one of the China weekend schools he had helped found in Ohio, while interacting with China adoptive families, that he got the idea for heritage camps that would serve not immigrant families wanting to insure that their kids didnÕt forget the motherland (those already existed), but heritage camps for adoptive families who wanted to insure that their kids stayed connected to their birth country. JimÕs volunteer spirit, and our willingness to make this book while not getting paid to do so, were compatible feelings of dedication and another key factor to making this partnership work.
Finally, our partnership with China on this book worked because Thimbleberry Press and China both value education, increasing the reach of cross-cultural understanding in general, and for this project, telling a more accurate story about girls and adoption. Jim, his former classmate, and leaders at COEA (and perhaps even up to the Central Committee) saw our book as one way to achieve these goals. And even more remarkably, as a way to tell girls adopted from China they are remembered and valued by their birth country.
Once the hard work of creating our book was over, we decided to celebrate with a traditional publication party. Well actually, a not-so-traditional publication party. We not only wanted to announce the arrival of our book, we also wanted to thank the Chinese government and the contributing adoptive families for partnering with us in its creation. Most of my experience with publication parties prior to this had been in the world of poetry where the party is likely to be a reading/book signing in a small, independent bookstore or art gallery. Finger food and wine served in plastic wine glasses are the likeliest refreshments and there is never a place to sit down. Great fun, especially when you know the author, but not quite suitable for honoring guests from the Chinese consulate.
With the help of local restaurateurs, Sue Sein and Alex Lee of Sesame restaurant in Montclair, New Jersey, we set about creating an elegant dinner for the key people responsible for bringing our project to fruition as well as some local media and special friends who had been important to us along the way. Alex and Sue were thrilled to have representatives from ChinaÕs New York consulate coming to their restaurant and created a special menu for the evening printed on lovely paper with the Thimbleberry Press logo proudly making its public debut. Here again a kitchen table figured prominently in our preparations. We spent quite a few hours at mine rolling up small scrolls with the eveningÕs program, sealing each scroll with a golden seal imprinted with our company seal and tying them up in red ribbon to be placed at each plate on the tables. In the spirit of cross-cultural respect it was important to us to present our guests from the Consulate and the attending families with appropriate gifts and speeches of gratitude. I designed, printed, and framed two honorary certificates of appreciation, one for the COEA and one for the Consulate. As tokens of not only our bi-cultural cooperation but also of Thimbleberry PressÕs bi-coastal nature (winters in New Jersey, summers in the copper country of Michigan near the shores of Lake Superior) we purchased a pair of raw copper-ore book ends from a gift shop near our summer home and had them mounted with a small engraved plaque for presentation to COEA. We were favored in return with a warm speech from Deputy Consul General Cui Aimen as well as a letter of congratulations from COEA translated on-the-spot for our honored guests by our much-put-upon calligrapher Li Yajing.
There were no red carpets or spot lights outside raking the sky, but the restaurant was surrounded by bodyguards from the Consulate—a fact that brought home to us, even in our excitement, the full impact of what we had accomplished. And inside the champagne flowed—in crystal glasses—as did the warmth between us. So a few months later when we began unloading the 80+ cartons of books that had arrived in Copper City from Beijing, the trust that China had placed in our intention, and the trust we placed in our own process had come to fruition. It was a mere 14 months after VirginiaÕs original idea and our first kitchen table planning session.
We now have our eye on an empty building in Copper City which could some day soon be a revitalized center for art and community activity as well as Thimbleberry PressÕs new headquarters. In 14 months youÕre all invited to the grand opening (I would say fingers crossed, but Virginia has already envisioned it so I guess itÕs a done deal) and we promise—no plastic champagne glasses.
[To visit our website go to http://www.thimbleberrypress.com]