I’m not a huge fan of memoirs, especially after reading some of those agonizing tell-alls that make the reader feel guilty just for complaining about traffic, but I have come across a couple great ones lately. Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield and Shut Up, I’m Talking by Gregory Levey come to mind as wonderful examples. I’ve just finished another one, Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood, that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Mei-Ling grew up in the mid-west as the adopted daughter of the Hopgoods, a couple of loving teachers who also adopted two younger sons from Korea. She knows that she came from Taiwan via a nun at St. Marys Hospital because her birth parents couldn’t care for her, but she’s never been curious to find out more. When one small inquiry goes amuck, Mei-Ling finds herself being called, emailed, faxed, and begged to return to Taiwan to meet her family. Eventually she finds herself excited about meeting this giant family and agrees to the trip. After getting off the plane in Taiwan, she meets both birth parents, her 5 older sisters, one older (actually adopted) brother, and several aunts, uncles, and extended family members.
Having always considered herself a lucky girl, lucky to have been adopted by parents who gave her everything she could ever want, lucky to leave a country where, traditionally, girls were not valued, and lucky to have been given away by poor parents who could not care for her, Mei-Ling soon finds that much of what she had assumed about her Taiwanese family was incorrect. She and her parents and sisters embrace each other and try to spend time getting to know each other, but secrets begin to leak.
Over the span of a decade, through various trips to several continents, Mei-Ling investigates her Chinese history and culture. She admits to some and confronts other Chinese stereotypes, eats tons of food, gets completely frustrated at the inability to communicate well with her birth parents, discovers and reunites with another adopted sister in Switzerland, and eventually comes to realize that her birth parents’ reasoning for giving her and her sister away had absolutely nothing to do with sacrificing a child so she may have a better life and everything to do with a father not wanting to waste any more effort on girls when he may one day have to provide for a perfect, healthy son.
The Wangs eventually overcome their poverty and enter the middle class managing to educate their daughters and send most of them to college. The parents are genuinely overjoyed to find their lost daughters, to the point of making generous contributions for plane fares and gold wedding jewelry. But these actions cannot cover up what haunts their past and what disturbs their present. As Mei-Ling comes to the end of her story she is freelance writing in Argentina with a husband and child of her own. She is happy to have found her sisters and loves them. She tries to understand the decisions her parents made in the times and culture in which they were made. She tries not to judge. She even tries to forgive.
As quoted by Kathleen Flinn on the cover of the book , Lucky Girl is “A compelling, honest, and very human tale about self-identity and the complex concept of family.” I agree. This is a well told story you should pick up if you enjoy memoirs that explore a wide range of emotions without being emotionally manipulative.
Books | Tim | 
June 2, 2009 8:13 am | 
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