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The Lost Daughters of China |  |
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The Lost Daughters of China | |
The elegant prose is spiced with bits of ironic cultural dissonance. A discount shopper, Evans "felt more than a little strange buying China-made [baby] clothes with which to bundle up a tiny baby, one of China's own, and bring her home." On a bus tour through southern China, she is one of a "bunch of Americans with Chinese infants singing 'Que Sera Sera' in the middle of a sea of traffic. Will she be happy?Will she be rich?" To suddenly hear Doris Day over the horns of a Kowloon traffic jam is heady stuff indeed.
The Lost Daughters of China is at its best when describing Evans's tally of emotional loss and gain. At one point the bureaucratic adoption process is unaccountably delayed, but her father dies during that time and she's able to sit by his bedside. The most mysterious example of this emotional calculus is Kelly's birth mother. Evans invents many plausible scenarios that caused this unknown woman to abandon her three-month-old daughter at a market. These incomplete, necessarily provisional stories help give a face to the larger cultural processes that compel new parents to abandon 1.7 million girl babies annually. The stuff of headlines--human rights, infanticide, rural and urban poverty--is rendered personally relevant in Evans's compelling book. --Kathi Inman Berens --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
After a 22-month-long adoptive "pregnancy" filled with heaps of paperwork, a U.S.-China liaison rang Evans and her husband one October evening in 1997 to say, "You have a daughter." According to her Chinese documents, the little girl was "found forsaken." While it is illegal to abandon babies in China, Evans reports that the number of "lost girls" is frighteningly high: "Babies, female babies, it seemed, were found everywhere, every day." Currently more than 18,000 Chinese-born children, predominantly girls, have been adopted by Americans. Evans's first trip to mainland China included the brief whirl of bureaucratic negotiations, sightseeing and eating in restaurants, leading up to her introduction to Kelly Xiao Yu, her year-old adopted daughter. Yet in the author's effort to understand the forces that shaped her daughter's situation, her lack of familiarity with China results in a heavy dependence on such sources as the writings of Confucius and Jasper Becker's 1997 book, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine--and few fresh insights. Evans shines, however, when depicting her new daughter's immediate affection for her and, following their return to the U.S., for the family dog and Harley Davidson motorcycles. In these lovingly wrought sections, devoted to exploring the mysterious process of adoption itself and Evans's quick fall into love with her newly "found" daughter, her narrative is both perceptive and moving. Agent, Barbara Moulton. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Each month, approximately 350 Chinese infants, almost all of them female, are adopted by Americans. Most of these babies were abandoned, left on the side of the road or in front of orphanages or community centers, by parents desperate to produce a son. Evans, who adopted daughter Kelly Xiao Yu in 1997, traces China's one-child policy historically, along the way scrutinizing the nation's male-centric bias. Her look at misogyny is riveting, but she takes great pains not to demonize the Chinese people. Instead, she eloquently assesses the conditions that force couples to abandon their offspring and chronicles the emotional anguish that accompanies the decision to give up a child. Her sense of ironyAthat her joy in adopting Kelly required others to relinquish a newbornAopens an evocative window on "intentional" parenting and bicultural socialization. Full of questions and insights about family and the morphing of cultures, this book is essential reading for those interested in adoption, population policy, or the politics of domestic arrangements. Recommended for all public libraries.AEleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Evans traveled with her husband to China in 1997 to adopt one of China's millions of baby girls abandoned by families struggling to conform to national population control policy. China's one-child-per-family diktat compels many families to give up undesirable girls in favor of coveted boys. Evans recalls the long and arduous waiting process, the anxiety-filled visit to the Chinese orphanage, and the adjustment back in the U.S., where thousands of families raise abandoned Chinese girls. She notes the infrequent letters left with the babies, which express love and regret, ask for forgiveness, and rebuke the government policy. The official papers for Evans' daughter simply said she was "found forsaken," with no indication of her identity or parentage. Evans also recounts China's long history of low regard for women and the evolution, prompted by famine and politics, of its population control policy. She brings a mother's and a reporter's perspectives to this moving account of China's troubling policy. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
