This is another book on the burgeoning phenomenon of the adoption of abandoned daughters from China by American couples or, in this case, a single American.
Emily Prager is a journalist now in her late 40s. She lives in New York and is known for her satirical columns in publications such as the New York Times, the Village Voice and the New York Observer. A child of a US serviceman, she spent several years in Taiwan during the 1950s. She loved the island, and throughout her adult life has remained a passionate Sinophile. So, when she first began to consider adopting a child as a single parent, China was the obvious place to look.
Wuhu Diary is the record of a two-month trip Prager made there in 1999 with LuLu, the daughter she had adopted from an orphanage nearly five years previously. It is in most respects an excellent book. It's honest, and though Prager often records herself crying, it's never sentimental. Yet when you look at the book closely you realize it succeeds against great odds.
Prager's plan was originally three-fold. First, she wanted to see the orphanage where LuLu was taken after being found abandoned beside a Wuhu city bridge. Second, she wanted to see if there were files still in existence that might give more information on LuLu's origins. And lastly, she hoped to meet again the nurse who actually handed the child over to her in 1994, and show her what had become of LuLu.
In the event, none of these aims was achieved. Moreover, soon after the pair arrived in China the American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade occurred.
When she first proposed the book to her publisher, as she surely did before setting out, projected scenes of reconciliation with LuLu's biological parents, and the presentation of a bouncing American five-year old at an orphanage full of waifs and strays, must have seemed like a striking commercial proposition. Yet all these expected high points were denied her. She learned that it was actually illegal in China for biological parents to make contact with their adopted children, that records concerning abandoned infants were not kept by the police, and that the nurse who handed over LuLu was now living in another town.
But despite the author's failure in tying up these loose ends, this is an enormously positive book. It is, among other things, a testament of love for China and the Chinese people.
LuLu attends a particularly delightful preschool for several weeks where all the pupils roller skate together daily with hysterical abandon. Prager herself even does a spot of teaching within the Chinese educational system. And over and over again she is amazed at what she sees, finding the university teachers' accommodation "gorgeous," the preschool (admittedly one connected with the university) "adorable," a hotel "a bit like Florida," a lake "astonishingly scenic," children singing "to perfection," a hospital's staff far more careful than, with her "Western prejudice," she had expected, people laughing and joking round every corner, and so on.
Americans, Prager writes, are fed a daily diet of media stories focusing on grim Chinese orphanages and the horrors of the one-child policy. That Chinese people love their children (with the implication that they do so more than some Americans) is something, she says, her fellow citizens often find it very hard to credit.
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