Lucky Girl

The true story of an American woman's unexpected reunion with her Chinese birth family: "A great book" (Good Housekeeping). In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan was brought to the United States, newly adopted by a loving couple in Michigan. Mei-Ling Hopgood had an all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry. Mei-Ling believed she was lucky to have escaped a life that was surely one of poverty and misery, to grow up in comfort with her doting parents and brothers. Then, when she was in her twenties, her birth family came calling. Rather than the rural peasants she always pictured, they are a boisterous, loving, bossy, complicated middle-class family who hound her daily—by phone, fax, and letter, in a language she doesn't understand—until she returns to Taiwan to meet them. As her biological sisters and parents pull her into their lives, claiming her as one of...