Book Review/Lucky Girl
Lucky Girl
A Memoir
By Mei-Ling Hopgood
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $23.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
“Some people spend a lifetime trying to understand, uncover or escape their past. Mine was like a dragon, fast and furious. I was blissfully ignorant, a sleeping ox about to be discovered and devoured.
“I was born in the year of the ox just another one of the endless baby girls born to and discarded by poor Chinese families. I arrived in the U.S. one April afternoon in 1974. I was eight months old. My mom said for one split second in that airport I was a dark, foreign bundle, someone else’s child but once in her arms I was theirs.
“My birth parents were shadows, known to me only in the folds of my eyelids, the curve of my chin or the shiny dark of my hair. Then one day when I was 23…”
With that introduction, Mei-Ling Hopgood begins a poignant memoir about a Chinese
girl abandoned in infancy and adopted by an American couple. She was the all-American girl who knew she was adopted but had little interest in discovering her past beyond Chris and Rollie Hopgood, the loving parents, who had given her a home that afforded her every opportunity.
That “one day when I was 23…” changed her life.
She had grown up American, attended college, studied journalism and was now a reporter
for the Detroit Free Press. Her adopted mother told her the nun who had arranged her adoption in Taiwan was living nearby and would like to talk to her. They made contact by phone and that phone call led to the discovery of her birth parents in Taiwan and to an emotional journey to meet the birth family, which included not only her mother and father, but her siblings.
Mei-Ling is a trained journalist and writes a compelling, emotionally powerful story about being reunited with strangers, in a strange land, with strange customs — a total contrast to her comfortable, American way of life.
“I had always known that one of the main reasons I had been given up was that I was a girl,” she wrote. “It was always the most scandalous part of why Mei-Ling came to America.”
She remembers how angry she was when she read about discarded female babies in China. “I had every right to be personally aggrieved by this belief, but thanks to the careful nurturing of my American parents, I thought I had risen above the whole Chinese male superiority thing,” she wrote, but added it came to life the day she met her biological sisters.
Through the contact with Sister Maureen Sinnott, the American nun who had arranged her adoption, Mei-Ling begins piecing together her birth in the Year of the Ox, August 26, 1973 at St. Mary’s hospital in Taiwan. Her biological family already had five girls and her father, Ba Wang, wanted her to be adopted, her mother did not. Sister Maureen had already been corresponding with the Hapgoods in America who wanted to adopt a baby. Despite her doubts, the birth mother relented and her sixth daughter was given up for adoption, Mei-Ling writes. She had not yet been named and she was given the name Mei-Ling which is Sister Maureen’s name in Chinese.
The story is about a painful discovery of an alternate universe and a question in Mei-Ling’s mind even today as to why she decided to visit the family that had given her up. She said “what follows is a journey between countries, between families, between destinies at first joyful, amusing and finally, disturbing. Why had I been given up, why did I need the ugly truth and why did I stick around after I knew. Was it a deep seeded need to be part of this family, an attempt to know myself better or was it journalistic curiosity, or all of the above?”
She unravels this unexpected dual life in the pages of her memoir. After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1994, she has worked as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before joining the Cox newspaper chain. Today, at age 31, she is a Washington correspondent for the Cox newspapers. “I’m interested in writing,” she said. “I want to do good stories and I want to have an impact.” If that is her wish, she achieves that impact with her unforgettable memoir.
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)