Prager was told that she was free to visit any orphanage she liked in Anhui Province except the one at Wuhu, probably because by chance it was the only one in the region that had not been re-built following the very bad publicity China received about the state of its orphanages in the 1980s.
The orphanage she did visit she found positively idyllic -- "a fairyland," colorful, landscaped, neat, and full of laughing children. The fact that she was given official permission to visit any other comparable institution in the province almost certainly guarantees that they too were similar. This is welcome news considering the situation as reported in the West only a few years ago.
An interesting aspect of Wuhu Diary is that Prager is a professional humorist, yet the book resists all temptation to satire. At one point she calls herself a "humorist who's scared of feeling." Here, where her feelings are obviously running high, she finds it possible to describe the Shanghai Zoo without resorting to farce, though she does allow herself to call it Dadaesque.
Another important dimension is that Prager was herself brought up by a single parent. Her father and mother had in effect separated, and after she flew out to join her father in Taiwan (flying, incidentally, on a propeller plane that stopped at San Francisco, Honolulu, Guam, Wake Island, Okinawa and Tokyo) she never lived with her mother again.
She credits Taiwan with forming her love of things Chinese. She remembers the Grand Hotel's swimming pool in 1958, and talks of the beauty of the island and the kindness of its people as having saved her sanity. "To this day, to be in the presence of Chinese people or things always soothes me," she writes.
This is certainly a pro-China book overall. It's unlikely that it set out with this in mind, however. Instead, it seeks to speak up for somewhere the author perceives has suffered from the brutal simplifications of a propaganda war. No doubt the same could be said for the US as seen in the eyes of many Chinese.
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