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.
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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