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.

My Easter message

From a letter written by Flannery O'Connor in 1962:

"Students get so bound up with difficulties such as reconciling the clashing of so many different faiths such as Buddhism, Mohamedanism [Islam], etc., that they cease to look for God in other ways. [Robert] Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. Bridges was an agnostic. He must have expected from Hopkins a long philosophical answer.

"Hopkins wrote back, 'Give alms.'

"He was trying to say to Bridges that God is to be experienced in Charity (in the sense of love for the divine image in human beings). Don't get so entangled with intellectual difficulties that you fail to look for God in this way."

Picador's Twitter book club for The Housekeeper and The Professor

PicadorUSA editor David Rogers hosted a book club on Twitter for Yoko Ogawa's novel "The Housekeeper and the Professor."

It was Good Friday, so that might have kept volume down a bit, but there was discussion throughout the day.

The next Picador book up for Twitter discussion will Augusten Burroughs' "A Wolf at the Table," on April 17. Hash tag is #pic2. Since Burroughs is a Twitterer, I'd expect a higher volume for this one.

Play ball! A lifetime of loving baseball

[Originally published in the March 31, 2002 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.]

While time may begin for some on opening day, my field of dreams is humbler than any big-league ballpark. I can see the village diamond out of the window of our living room.

I enjoy professional baseball as much as the next guy in a town where the team hasn't finished above .500 for nearly a decade. But the game I truly love is a homemade thing, not the store-bought variety.

In the Little League where I grew up, every child, by rule, had to bat at least once and play in the field in every game he showed up for. All you need to know about my level of baseball skill as an overweight, near-sighted boy was that I batted ninth and played three innings a game in right field, the least damaging place for any competitive coach to put me.

Yet he who is least desired often loves the fiercest. Playing the game is threaded through my life in an intimate and powerful way.

I don't like sports-as-life-lessons-learned analogies, but when you bat ninth, it's hard to avoid picking up on a few things.

For example, some coaches don't care about the guys at the bottom of the lineup. In one game, I misplayed a ball in right field, and the batter ended up safe at second base.

Before my red face even had time to cool off, the next batter smoked a ball my way. I fielded it cleanly on the run, turned and threw out the first runner at home plate. The coach of my own team had nothing to say to me about either my error or the best throw I had ever made -- but the opposing coach came over to our bench between innings to compliment me, an act of sportsmanship I'll never forget.

Continued

Adding Magic: Book weaves wonders of math, baseball together

The Housekeeper and the Professor. By Yoko Ogawa. Picador paperback, $14.

Baseball and math are old friends. But no one I've read has ever demonstrated their congruency as gracefully as Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa does in this slender novel.

The unnamed narrator is sent to work at the cottage of the Professor, who has worn out nine previous housekeepers. He's not senile, explains his sister-in-law. But due to a car accident 17 years ago, his memory is limited: "It's as if he has a single, eighty-minute videotape inside his head, and when he records anything new, he has to record over the existing memories."

The Professor copes with his condition through handwritten notes attached to his suit. The biggest note reminds him of his memory loss and 80-minute limit. Soon he has added one with a sketch of his new housekeeper's face.

Damaged and shy, the Professor is still brilliant, spending his time on complex mathematical puzzles for journals. We're in Oliver Sacks territory here, of mental gifts offsetting mental deficits. The down-to-earth housekeeper is drawn slowly into his orbit of factorials, perfect numbers, Euler and Fermat.

She, in turn, gently tethers him to humanity. She's a single mother; when the Professor learns she has a 10-year-old son, he insists the son come to his house after school. Seeing the son's flat head, the Professor nicknames him Root, for square root. A friendship blossoms. The Professor is an enthusiastic teacher, praising even wrong answers for the effort of discovery. The fatherless boy doesn't love school, but basks in the old man's warm attention.

They also bond over baseball. Root is nuts about it. The Professor, too, is a fan. He has never seen a game, but he has a tin of prized baseball cards, including his favorite player, left-handed Hanshin Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu, whose perfect number 28 is so pleasing.

The housekeeper treats them to a game by the visiting Tigers, though she and Root sweat about how to explain the absence of the long-retired Enatsu. The game is magical, and the Professor finds math everywhere in the experience: His excited discourse on the Ruth-Aaron pair of 714-715 is not to be missed.

Misunderstanding of their affection forces them apart, until the Professor demands their reunion in a most mathematical way. After she returns to work for him, the housekeeper glimpses some of the secrets hidden by his memory loss.

Ogawa's prose, as translated by Stephen Snyder, flows so smoothly her book can easily be read in an afternoon on the couch, especially if a Brewers game is playing softly on the radio. The sometimes complex math that surfaces in the story is fully explained in context.

"I think I'm a little smarter when I'm in the Professor's office," says Root. Anyone who reads this magical book will likely be both a little smarter and a little kinder afterward.

A footnote for Milwaukee readers: In 1985, at age 36, after his illustrious Japanese baseball career ended, Enatsu signed a minor-league deal with the Brewers and tried unsuccessfully to make the big-league club in spring training.

Follow Jim Higgins on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jhiggy.