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Product Description
A personal and journalistic exploration of American and Chinese culture at a unique point of intersection: the thousands of baby girls who are abandoned in one country each year and adopted in the other.
Today Karin Evans is the mother of Kelly, a thriving Chinese-American toddler. But two years ago, her daughter was one of the hundreds of thousands of infant girls abandoned in orphanages all over China. The story of how Kelly came to be there is rooted deep in China's history, in an ancient political, economic, and cultural preference for baby boys that began in the time of Confucius and was still going strong when China's notorious one-child policy was introduced in the 1980s.
Through extensive research combined with the moving account of bringing Kelly home, Evans investigates the conditions that engendered generations of abandoned girls in China and a legacy of lost women. She provides insight into the historic place of sons and daughters in the Chinese family, the philosophical underpinnings of filial piety, as well as the selective abortions and other desperate acts undertaken by contemporary families convinced of the need for a son to perpetuate the family line. In this eloquent journalistic memoir, Evans compellingly links the lives of an abandoned Chinese baby girl, an adoptive American mother, and a Chinese mother hidden in the shadows.
"Not only an evocative memoir on East-West adoption but a bridge to East-West understanding of human rights in China." --Amy Tan
Lyrically written, precisely observed and emotionally evocative . . . Evans is simply dazzling." --Tim Cahill
Amazon.com Review
The Lost Daughters of China is that rare book that can be many things to different people. Part memoir, part travelogue, part East-West cultural commentary, and part adoption how-to, Karin Evans's book is greater than the sum of its parts. Evans weaves together her experience of adopting a Chinese infant with observations about Chinese women's history and that country's restrictive, if unevenly enforced, reproductive policies. She and her husband adopted Kelly Xiao Yu in 1997, and anyone curious about adopting from a Chinese orphanage--which houses girls and disabled boys--will learn about the mechanics and the emotional freight of the two-year process. Borrowing an image from Chinese folklore, Evans conveys herself, her husband, and their daughter as tethered by a red string that yoked them across an ocean and an equally awesome cultural divide.
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
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