When I selected this memoir by a Taiwanese adoptee raised by white parents in Michigan reunited with her birth family, I expected something a bit more critical than Lucky Girl turns out to be. I guess I thought the title would be more ironic than it is. I don't think the title is entirely unlayered, but the author does seem pretty happy with how her life turned out, rather than how it might have if she'd remained one of too many (seven?) daughters of a Chinese couple that kept at it in the hopes of eventually producing a healthy, non-deformed boy.
Although Hopgood is a professional journalist, I wasn't particularly taken with her writing. This memoir is a little disjointed, with some extraneous elements thrown in. The extraneous elements of which I speak are the kinds of things that usually interest me, the more personal takes on things, self-image and esteem, childhood woes, etc., but they aren't woven into the story neatly enough and so stick out as something to discuss with a shrink or daytime talk-show host, rather than the reader.
I don't mean to be entirely down on the book. It is an okay read, and I was genuinely moved at points.
Besides, to my child mind, adoption seemed a plenty logical way for people to reproduce, way more reasonable than the idea that women grew babies in their bellies that popped out after forty weeks. It made all the sense in the world to me that we would pick up my new brother at the airport--I mean, that's where I came from, right? p.69