Book review: "Lucky Girl"

Reconnecting

Memoir takes realistic look at joy, pain of adopted woman's discoveries

Posted: Apr. 18, 2009 4:18 p.m.

Mei-Ling Hopgood celebrated Chinese New Year 1998 in the Taiwan home of her Chinese birthparents, with her white American adoptive parents, her Korean brothers, her younger sister's Swiss mother, and her flock of Chinese sisters and their husbands, boyfriends and children.

Amid the shrieking, multilingual cacophony, awareness struck her:

"My God, I thought. Everyone, every person, every movement - all the chaos in this room is related to me in some way."

As her memoir reveals, Hopgood, 35, has been a lucky girl at least twice in her life. At 7 months, she was adopted by Rollie and Chris Hopgood, a loving pair of suburban Detroit teachers. Then, as a young woman, a line in a letter to the friendly nun who helped arrange her adoption was the opening that led her to her large and boisterous birth family. That reunion has led to painful discoveries as well as joyful embraces. But she is clearly a much deeper person because of it.

Adoption stories can be tediously didactic or passionately overwrought. I know: I'm the adoptive father of two Asian children, and I've read many of them. Happily, "Lucky Girl" is a superior book because Hopgood is fair-minded, realistic and uninterested in making big pronouncements about adoption.

"I sometimes resented people's assumptions that adoptees must automatically, deep down, feel part empty or abandoned," she writes. She felt secure in the love of the Hopgoods, and when she writes about Rollie Hopgood's unexpected death in her memoir, we feel her pain.

But growing up in white and black Detroit, she felt awkward being Asian, and overcompensated to prove her Americanness. Meeting her Chinese sisters leads her to greater acceptance of not only her ethnic identity, but also her body: She shares some telling and funny moments of discussing and comparing breasts, legs and eyes with her newfound siblings.

Bringing her journalistic skills to her life story (she's been a reporter for Detroit and St. Louis newspapers), Hopgood learns that she was the sixth daughter born to a couple she calls Ma and Ba. Ba, desperate to have a son, insisted that they could not afford another girl and asked hospital nurses about placing her for adoption. The author was named Mei-Ling after the Chinese name of Sister Maureen, the nun who helped arrange her adoption by the Hopgoods. We find out that she has a younger sister, Irene, who was adopted by a Swiss family.

Her Taiwan sisters are a strong, successful bunch, but as Hopgood digs further into her family's story, we learn how Ba's obsession with having a son has warped and damaged his marriage and family. Being an outsider to years of family dynamics, Hopgood struggles to grasp why Ma has endured some of Ba's actions, and finally learns a painful family secret. She comes to accept, if not fully understand, her birthmother, and to feel secure and truly fortunate in being a girl from this family.

Now a mother herself, living in Argentina with her husband, she is truly a woman of the world.

Hopgood will read from "Lucky Girl" at 7 p.m. May 18 at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., Milwaukee.