The Lost Daughters of China is that rare book that can be many things to different people. Part memoir, part travelogue, part East-West cultural commentary, and part adoption how-to, Karin Evans's book is greater than the sum of its parts. Evans weaves together her experience of adopting a Chinese infant with observations about Chinese women's history and that country's restrictive, if unevenly enforced, reproductive policies. She and her husband adopted Kelly Xiao Yu in 1997, and anyone curious about adopting from a Chinese orphanage--which houses girls and disabled boys--will learn about the mechanics and the emotional freight of the two-year process. Borrowing an image from Chinese folklore, Evans conveys herself, her husband, and their daughter as tethered by a red string that yoked them across an ocean and an equally awesome cultural divide.

The elegant prose is spiced with bits of ironic cultural dissonance. A discount shopper, Evans "felt more than a little strange buying China-made [baby] clothes with which to bundle up a tiny baby, one of China's own, and bring her home." On a bus tour through southern China, she is one of a "bunch of Americans with Chinese infants singing 'Que Sera Sera' in the middle of a sea of traffic. Will she be happy? Will she be rich?" To suddenly hear Doris Day over the horns of a Kowloon traffic jam is heady stuff indeed.

The Lost Daughters of China is at its best when describing Evans's tally of emotional loss and gain. At one point the bureaucratic adoption process is unaccountably delayed, but her father dies during that time and she's able to sit by his bedside. The most mysterious example of this emotional calculus is Kelly's birth mother. Evans invents many plausible scenarios that caused this unknown woman to abandon her three-month-old daughter at a market. These incomplete, necessarily provisional stories help give a face to the larger cultural processes that compel new parents to abandon 1.7 million girl babies annually. The stuff of headlines--human rights, infanticide, rural and urban poverty--is rendered personally relevant in Evans's compelling book. --Kathi Inman Berens


From Publishers Weekly
After a 22-month-long adoptive "pregnancy" filled with heaps of paperwork, a U.S.-China liaison rang Evans and her husband one October evening in 1997 to say, "You have a daughter." According to her Chinese documents, the little girl was "found forsaken." While it is illegal to abandon babies in China, Evans reports that the number of "lost girls" is frighteningly high: "Babies, female babies, it seemed, were found everywhere, every day." Currently more than 18,000 Chinese-born children, predominantly girls, have been adopted by Americans. Evans's first trip to mainland China included the brief whirl of bureaucratic negotiations, sightseeing and eating in restaurants, leading up to her introduction to Kelly Xiao Yu, her year-old adopted daughter. Yet in the author's effort to understand the forces that shaped her daughter's situation, her lack of familiarity with China results in a heavy dependence on such sources as the writings of Confucius and Jasper Becker's 1997 book, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine--and few fresh insights. Evans shines, however, when depicting her new daughter's immediate affection for her and, following their return to the U.S., for the family dog and Harley Davidson motorcycles. In these lovingly wrought sections, devoted to exploring the mysterious process of adoption itself and Evans's quick fall into love with her newly "found" daughter, her narrative is both perceptive and moving. Agent, Barbara Moulton. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Each month, approximately 350 Chinese infants, almost all of them female, are adopted by Americans. Most of these babies were abandoned, left on the side of the road or in front of orphanages or community centers, by parents desperate to produce a son. Evans, who adopted daughter Kelly Xiao Yu in 1997, traces China's one-child policy historically, along the way scrutinizing the nation's male-centric bias. Her look at misogyny is riveting, but she takes great pains not to demonize the Chinese people. Instead, she eloquently assesses the conditions that force couples to abandon their offspring and chronicles the emotional anguish that accompanies the decision to give up a child. Her sense of ironyAthat her joy in adopting Kelly required others to relinquish a newbornAopens an evocative window on "intentional" parenting and bicultural socialization. Full of questions and insights about family and the morphing of cultures, this book is essential reading for those interested in adoption, population policy, or the politics of domestic arrangements. Recommended for all public libraries.AEleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Evans traveled with her husband to China in 1997 to adopt one of China's millions of baby girls abandoned by families struggling to conform to national population control policy. China's one-child-per-family diktat compels many families to give up undesirable girls in favor of coveted boys. Evans recalls the long and arduous waiting process, the anxiety-filled visit to the Chinese orphanage, and the adjustment back in the U.S., where thousands of families raise abandoned Chinese girls. She notes the infrequent letters left with the babies, which express love and regret, ask for forgiveness, and rebuke the government policy. The official papers for Evans' daughter simply said she was "found forsaken," with no indication of her identity or parentage. Evans also recounts China's long history of low regard for women and the evolution, prompted by famine and politics, of its population control policy. She brings a mother's and a reporter's perspectives to this moving account of China's troubling policy. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
"This book calls attention to the pressing issues of abandoned baby girls in China, the result of a combination of historical and cultural prejudices against women and the current draconian, one-child policy. The Lost Daughters of China is an evocative memoir that will not only attract parents or would-be parents of Chinese baby girls but will touch the hearts of us all." (Chicago Tribune)

Proclaimed an instant classic upon its hardcover publication, The Lost Daughters of China is at once compelling and informative. Journalist Karin Evans tells the story of adopting her daughter, Kelly, who was once one of the hundreds of thousands of infant girls who wait for parents in orphanages all over China. Weaving her personal account with extensive research, Evans investigates the conditions that have led to generations of abandoned Chinese girls and a legacy of lost women.

With a new epilogue added for the paperback edition, this book will appeal to anyone interested in China and in the emotional ties that connect people regardless of genes or culture. In the words of bestselling novelist Amy Tan, The Lost Daughters of China is "not only an evocative memoir on East-West adoption but also a bridge to East-West understanding of human rights in China."


About the Author
Karin Evans, a former editor at Outside magazine, senior editor for Health magazine, and senior editor for the San Francisco Examiner's Sunday magazine, was a founding editor of Rocky Mountain Magazine. Evans spent two years working at Newsweek's Hong Kong bureau.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"This book calls attention to the pressing issues of abandoned baby girls in China, the result of a combination of historical and cultural prejudices against women and the current draconian, one-child policy. The Lost Daughters of China is an evocative memoir that will not only attract parents or would-be parents of Chinese baby girls but will touch the hearts of us all." (Chicago Tribune)

Proclaimed an instant classic upon its hardcover publication, The Lost Daughters of China is at once compelling and informative. Journalist Karin Evans tells the story of adopting her daughter, Kelly, who was once one of the hundreds of thousands of infant girls who wait for parents in orphanages all over China. Weaving her personal account with extensive research, Evans investigates the conditions that have led to generations of abandoned Chinese girls and a legacy of lost women.

With a new epilogue added for the paperback edition, this book will appeal to anyone interested in China and in the emotional ties that connect people regardless of genes or culture. In the words of bestselling novelist Amy Tan, The Lost Daughters of China is "not only an evocative memoir on East-West adoption but also a bridge to East-West understanding of human rights in China."