Book Review

Hopgood, Mei Ling. Lucky Girl: a Memoir. Chapel Hill, Algonquin Books, 2009.

In 1974 Mei Ling Hopgood was adopted from Taiwan by Rollie and Chris Hopgood in what was to be one of the first international adoptions. After about seven months of bureaucratic red tape, Mei Ling was finally able to join her American family. Growing up in Taylor Michigan ( a suburb of Detroit) with parents whom she loved and who loved her dearly and with two younger brothers who were adopted from Korea, Mei Ling lived an all American girlhood and barely gave a though to the family who gave her up. But her birth family showed up out of the blue wanting to meet her and would not take no for an answer.

Her birth family turned out to be a middle class family of Chinese ancestry living in Taipei, defying Mei Lings expectations of a poor peasant family living in the country. Along the way she also met her sister Irene Hoffmann, also given up at birth by their birth parents to a couple from Switzerland.

Mei Lings memoir deals sensitively with the conflicting emotions she has felt about meeting a family who is so different culturally from her in ways she can't ignore. She also deals with how she felt growing up in the seventies near Detroit as one of the few people of Asian descent and facing barely disguised anti Asian discrimination while at the same time considering herself to be fully American.

This was a wonderful book which was hard to put down. I would highly recommend it.