Mary McCarty: New book looks at complexity of family

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By Mary McCarty, Staff Writer Updated 1:50 AM Thursday, April 30, 2009

What will happen when she starts to ask questions about her birth family?

Maybe she’ll throw it in our faces: “You aren’t my real parents!”

Such are the worries of adoptive parents everywhere. For the tens of thousands of American families like mine who have adopted from China, it’s a particular puzzle. With the first wave of adoptees now in their teens, our daughters have virtually no adult role models.

Since the recent publication of her memoir “Lucky Girl” (Algonquin Books), my friend Mei-Ling Hopgood has been besieged by questions from the China adoption community.

“They are really hungry for a ‘grown-up’ perspective — though I’m not sure mine is so grown up,” she said. “Lots of these girls are now in their teens or tweens, becoming young ladies, and the identity issues that once seemed so distant are staring the families right in the face.”

Readers will remember Hopgood, who now lives and writes in Argentina, as the Dayton Daily News Washington correspondent and political columnist from 2001 to 2004. She’ll discuss her new book at 7 p.m. Monday, May 4, at the Town & Country location of Books & Co. It’s a fascinating account of the circumstances of her birth in Taiwan and her adoption by American parents Chris and Rollie Hopgood in 1974. Her father was a well-known educator and passionate union man; she and her Korean-born brothers were virtually the only Asian-Americans in the blue-collar town of Taylor, Mich.

Her upbringing proved an exceedingly happy one, and Hopgood registered on the low end of the curiosity scale about her birth family. At the age of 21, she received a call from the Catholic nun who facilitated her adoption. That set in motion a reunion with her large and complicated birth family, ultimately leading to “a memoir for anyone who has ever had a family. Or two,” as the dust jacket states.

“I like to think the book is about lots more than adoption, rather about the complexity of family and the past and figuring out how it fits in your present and future,” Hopgood said.

Hopgood doesn’t pretend her story is a universal one for the China adoption community: “But one thing they can take away from it is that love and honesty are the most important things you can give your child — that if something like this were to happen (or not to happen), that the strength they gave them will get them through it.”

I was lucky to have Mei-Ling as a friend when I was going through the process of adopting our daughter Ni-Ni from China in 2002. It was comforting to see a well-adjusted, successful adult who very much regarded her adoptive parents as her real family. That message was reinforced by the sudden death of her beloved father from heart failure while on a bicycling vacation in Hawaii in 2002. The tragedy made her feel more distant from her birth father. “I could not bear the thought he was the father I had left,” she wrote.

One of the most powerful juxtapositions is between the spirited, strong-willed journalist and the culture that rejected her for the sin of being born female. It’s a contrast that came full circle with the birth of Hopgood’s daughter, Sofia, in 2007. She was overjoyed when an ultrasound revealed the baby’s gender, later realizing that the news of yet another girl would have seemed to her birth parents “as another in an endless string of losing lottery tickets.”

This beautifully written memoir, with its dark secrets and redeeming moments, certainly qualifies as a universal story about family. It’s also immensely reassuring to those of us who have been blessed with children from China.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@Dayton DailyNews.com.

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