Prager, Emily. Wuhu diary.Random House, Doubleday, Anchor. 238p. illus. c2001. 0-375-72199-4. $13.00. This incisive and accessible record of the middle-aged author's trip to China with her four-year-old daughter Lulu has a variety of remarkable aspects. Lulu was taken as a three-day-old infant to a local police station in her small industrial city after being found on a nearby bridge. She lived for seven months in a Chinese orphanage ORPHANAGE, Eng. law. By the custom of London, when a freeman of that city dies, his estate is divided into three parts, as follows: one third part to the widow; another, to the children advanced by him in his lifetime, which is called the orphanage; and the other third part may be by him , a modestly run institution housing predominantly girls abandoned by parents under the influence of China's one-child policy The Planned Birth policy (Simplified Chinese: 计划生育; Pinyin: jìhuà shēngyù) is the birth control policy of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC). . Emily, a journalist and novelist (Eve's Tattoo, 1991), had spent a significant part of her childhood in Taiwan and had traveled in China as an adult. A single white woman living in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , she adopted Lulu in 1994, and from the beginning attended to her child's need to know about her birth culture. In 1998, she took Lulu to Wuhu, China, for a six-week stay, at a time that happened to coincide with the U.S. bombing of China's newly relocated embassy in Yugoslavia. Prager's daily accounting of the events of her family trip takes into consideration Lulu's adjustments to her identity as an adopted Chinese girl Chinese Girl is a 1950 painting by Vladimir Tretchikoff. It became one of the world's most popular paintings when made into print in the 1960s and 1970s, and is one of the world's best-selling art prints. , the joy mother and daughter take in such spontaneous activities as roller skating roller skating, gliding on a hard, smooth, durable surface on skates with rollers or wheels, in recent years has become a popular adult sport. Skates mounted on wooden rollers date from the 1860s, and soon wooden wheels replaced the rollers. and eating ice cream, and Chinese television's ongoing reports of the diplomatic situation, as well as the social treatment of Prager as an American in China and her ongoing efforts to find out what she can of Lulu's past so that she can give as much as she can to her child. Prager's capacity to share her child with the locals is gratifying grat·i·fy tr.v. grat·i·fied, grat·i·fy·ing, grat·i·fies 1. To please or satisfy: His achievement gratified his father. See Synonyms at please. 2. to all; their generous responses to Lulu are delightful. This book will have appeal to anyone who likes a good family story, as well as to those in cross-cultural adoptive families, those with interests in how political policies play out in culture, and to mother/daughter book groups. Francisca Goldsmith, Teen Svcs., Berkeley P.L., Berkeley, CA |
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