Customer Reviews

Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

As a Chinese-American who has lived in China for years, and who is thinking about adopting a girl from China, this book sounded very interesting to me but I could not even finish reading it. It's not worth the time.

I agree with the negative reviews below on two issues: 1) It is questionable whether a five-year-old should be exposed to the harsh reality about her past; 2) The book is thin on facts and has too much mother's musings and her interpretations of the daughter's feelings and thoughts. I have no idea how accurate these interpretations were, and as a result I have no idea how the daughter actually felt about this experience.

But there is more. The book is not even a good travel monologue. First, the book is full of factual errors. To give a few examples, the powerful Shanghai gangster's name is Du Yuesheng, not Yu Dusheng; Chinese kids start school at the age of six, not seven; to "translate" English into pinyin, as the teacher at LuLu's preschool did for the author (so we are told), is totally meaningless. Chinese people don't read pinyin. pinyin is a method to help school kids learn the pronunciations of the Chinese characters. Second, two months' time is too short to understand China, and it shows in the book. The author claims she loves China. But she loves China because China is exotic to her. China in her book is simply a stereotypical Communist country with nice but simple people, One hardly sees a country shaped by its rich cultural and historical heritage and the complexity of its people. Numerous places in the book showed that the author judges things by what she knows about America, such judgments don't help one to understand a different culture. If one really wants to read a book about China that's perceptive and insightful, without prejudice and without being judgmental, if one wants to forget about his race, background and political preferences and wants to understand the Chinese as fellow human beings, please read Peter Hessler's Two Years on the Yangtze and Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk.

I give the book 2 stars insteadof one because it has a story in it that's worth knowing. But the author should have written a 10-page article instead of the book.

Emily Prager's account of her trip to Wuhu with her daughter Lulu is a tribute to her awareness of her daughter's need to make real some vague images and feelings about her birthparents, birthplace and Chinese identity. Lulu was not too young (as one reviewer mentioned) to be taken on this journey. What a five-year-old learns from such a trip is different from what a ten-year-old learns, but that does not invalidate the younger child's experiences. It seems to me it took great courage for Ms. Prager to take her daughter on a journey that was surely quite difficult, both physically and emotionally. The book is a moving and honest account of their stay and the relationships they developed while living in a relatively isolated city with few other foreigners. The descriptions of everyday life--what they ate, their experiences at the hospital, at the nursery school, etc--are precisely what makes this book compelling reading. It is not a romantic depiction of China but an honest attempt to live among the people that share with her daughter their biological roots and to give her some concrete notion of where she is from. This is a personal journey, and I doubt it is meant to be read in any other way. I think it is a terrific book. What we take away from it is the basic humanity we share with people around the world, regardless of their ethnic or racial background. Certainly a timely message.

As the parent of a child adopted from China, I found this book highly contrived and genunely offensive on a variety of levels. First, and foremost, it is an intimate account of the psyche of a FIVE YEAR OLD CHILD adopted from China and her feelings about her adoption. But not by the child, by her mother. This is ridiculous and impossible and an invasion of the child's very soul. And her privacy What will this girl think of her mother's convoluted conjecture about the way in which she felt -- and behaved -- when she was in kindergarten as this kid grows up?

This is a powerful subject: taking an internationally adopted child back to the country and culture in which she was born and now the author has RUINED any chances of ANYONE ever writing another book on the subject again -- and writing it with or on behalf of a child who is mature enough to consent to the work.

Thumbs down. Don't honor this book by purchasing it asks this adoptive parent!

While very, very well written, this book is both inconsistent, disappointing and disturbing. The writer, an established author, takes her nearly five year old daughter adopted from China, back to Wuhu, the small city in which she was abandoned at birth and adopted (by the author) some eight or nine months later. But what exactly is the point of the trip? The child is very young and her perceptions, though her mother has her "saying" very mature things, are that of a preschooler -- they are very limited and often even very confused. The mother tells us at the beginning of the book that her daughter is happy, easy, terrific, and generally well adjusted. Yet at the end of the book, when the pair return to New York another mother of an adopted Chinese child mentions how astonishing it is that the "black cloud" over Lulu (the child)'s head has been lifted by a trip to China to find her roots. Strikingly, there did not appear to be a black cloud before the trip, nor does the author really get into how this trip back has changed or altered herself or her daughter in any significant way other than to go on an interesting trip to China and write and write and write about what she saw, ate, and what illnesses and injuries befell the two. The reason for this is clear: this child is too young to really understand what is going on and what her mother intends for her to take away from this journey -- that mush is clear throughout. With meticulous detail, Prager tells us every moment of her journey, right down to the American junk food available in the hotel shops she and her daughter frequent. But at the heart of this volume, there is a void and the void is a child far too immature at this particular moment in time to connect with her past and a mother far too eager to embellish upon what she assumes her daughter is feeling and thinking -- something adoptive parents would be wise to avoid. In some ways, the book is even chilling: the child "connects" with workers in the hotel the pair stay in in Wuhu and assumes that they must be her biological parents and no one really corrects her very dangerous thinking. And sadder still is this: the publication of this book has effectively closed the door in the world of publishing for a writer with an older and more ready child adopted from China to publish an account of a trip back to the child's literal and emotional roots in the country in which she was born. For a nine or ten year old's take on this type of a momentous journey would be so much richer and more intense than little Lulu who appears to be along mostly for her mother's ride. Finally, there is no mention of one stark fact: there are over 40,000 adopted Chinese children in the United States now and their adoption stories are often written and reported. Do we have the right to do that when children who are too young to say or know whether they want or feel comfortable with their stories being publicized? These are their stories, after all and will be the fabric of their lives as they grow.
This reviewer is the parent of a six year old girl adopted from the People's Republic of China.

I loved this book not only because of the wonderful author, but also because LuLu is simply a delightful child. There were many passages in the book that touched me. I didn't read the book because I wanted facts. Instead, I wished to learn more about the interactions between a mother and a child who are not of the same race. I was far from disappointed.
This mother loved her child so much that she wanted to return to the country where LuLu was born so that LuLu could better understand her origins and why she doesn't look like her adoptive mother. Some readers were troubled that LuLu might have been too young, but they are underestimating a child's capacity and resilience. I find LuLu fascinating. I wish her mom (the author) would write more about her adopted daughter and their life together.

Wuhu Diary records the author's trip to Wuhu China with the daughter whom she adopted from that city. Adopted as an infant, Ms. Prager's daughter is five-years-old during the narrative, and has been coming to grips with being Chinese and American, and the daughter of a single white woman. When I heard the author interviewed on NPR I felt that the daughter was much too young for such an emotionally demanding trip and after reading the book I am all the more convinced that this is true. Not only does the daughter go to an orphanage (not the same one where she stayed ) but she is shown the bridge where she was abandoned. Before the trip she had thought she'd been left at a hospital, small comfort but at least some comfort. Now the daughter must, at five years old, process the truth of her abandonment to the elements and to sheer chance. I find the psychodrama unleashed upon the daughter positively appalling, and I only hope that she has a therapeutic avenue available to her.

Beautifully written descriptions from an American's point of view on rural China. I felt like I was on the journey with them. It was eye opening in the fact that Emily was the minority in her daughter's country and her daughter LuLu blended in well in the local school and hotel. Emily describes her language and cultural barriers. It took alot of courage for her to take the trip to live there. I would love to see her visit China again to write a second book in another 5 years when her daughter is a pre-teen. If she did that, I am sure her daughter wouldn't fit in to the local community as she did when she was 4-5 years old.

When we adopted our daughter in 1999 we were not able to visit her hometown of Wuhu. This book helped us to connect with her birthplace, and let us relive the excitement of forming our family through adoption. Through detailed descriptions of the people and places Emily Prager has given us a great gift. I felt like I was right beside her. Maybe I am biased, but I think this is a wonderful book for anybody adopting internationally. It hit home for us in a big way!

I must agree with the writer from Honolulu, also as a parent of a daughter adopted from China, I find this book very haunting in the fact that there is a lot of acting out from Lulu and Ms. Praeger just assumes that it is Lulu's way of "connecting" with China. The fact that Lulu so easily attaches herself to every person they meet in China and Ms. Praeger doesn't think anything of this is almost a little much. This journey was clearly for mom and not for Lulu. Have I taken my daughter back to China? Yes, but she was older than Lulu when we made the journey and certainly we did not spend more than a month drumming my daughter's past into her head. There are many other books much better for understanding China and the adoption process. I won't be sharing this book with my daughter when she is older.

While garnering some positive reviews from people who do not claim to be adoptive parents, this book is very controversial to those who do make that claim. In fact, it gave at least one adoptive parent "the creeps." But everybody seems to agree that Ms. Prager has a wonderful way with words.

But it's the author's eloquence that seems to be cause of the controversy. Amidst a journey that is likely to stir some complex emotions in the mind and heart of a 5-year-old adoptee named Lulu, the author translates Lulu's thoughts and feelings into a remarkably articulate prose. This causes disbelief. One questions whether the author has accurately translated her daughter's feelings and then one begins to question whether such a soul-searching back to her roots trip is really appropriate for such a young child.

In defense of the author, however, it is really up to her to decide when her daughter is ready for such a trip, and however implausible, it is at least possible that she could read her daughter's mind the way she seems to. But however you feel about this book, it does succeed in challenging those of us with children from China to think about whether, when, and under what circumstances a trip back to China would be appropriate. And for that, I am grateful to Ms. Prager for writing it.