The first reaction to finishing Lucky Girl is ‘lucky readers.’ Definitely of the ‘you can’t make this stuff up’-genre, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood‘s debut memoir is one lucky surprise after another. Paced just right to keep you reading, the Taiwanese-born Hopgood reveals a remarkable story of her Midwest adoption to a loving, nurturing family and her reunion more than two decades later with her sprawling birthfamily on the other side of the world.
To share Hopgood’s emotional adventure in her own words should not be denied lucky readers … so feel free stop reading here. If you want a few more enticing tidbits, read on …
Adopted at just seven months from Taiwan, Hopgood grew up the oldest child in a close-knit family of five, including two younger adopted brothers originally from Korea (one of her brothers becomes a local politician in adulthood!). While she always knew she was adopted, she spent most of her ‘lucky’ life without too much curiosity about her Asian heritage.
In early 1997, Hopgood was a St. Louis-based reporter, in her early 20s, in the midst of preparing for a party she was hosting in her new apartment. It was the Year of the Ox again, two cycles from her own Ox birth. A phone call from Sister Maureen, the nun who facilitated Hopgood’s adoption, brings shocking news: Sister Maureen reveals not only birthparents who are longing to see her, but six sisters and a brother in Taiwan, and yet another sister in Switzerland who had also been given up for adoption.
The Chinese New Year celebration was fast approaching … and Hopgood’s birthfamily was hoping , longing , begging for a family reunion: “I felt elated and strange, with only a vague sense that much of what I knew about who I was and what I believed about my past and future was about to change.” Understatement indeed.
Go get the book – it just came out in paperback last month to make it more accessible … and portable! Good thing because you’re going to want to take it with you wherever you go to find out what happens next … Lucky you!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009
Su Qi, a sensitive Chinese Malaysian youth, comes of age in the magical jungles of Borneo, shaped by the cruelty he witnesses at the hands of his abusive father and his loving but withdrawn mother. He is bewitched by the elusive daughter of his father’s best friend, but when she falls into a hopeless coma (yes, another sleeping beauty!) after a near fatal fall, Su Qi escapes to Taiwan, where he enters college and meets a vibrant fellow student singer with secrets of her own.
Four short stories and a longer novella are linked together to create a mosaic of disparate voices that share a visceral longing for a time – and place – forever past. Chu adroitly leads readers through a contemporary Taiwan displaced by Japanese colonial overtones mixed with inescapable Western cultural influences.
Here’s the updated second edition of what was already considered the definitive overview of modern Chinese literature in English translation, with representative writing from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. With China poised to become a dominant world player in the 21st century, this anthology is a great introduction to some of the very best in Chinese language fiction, poetry, and essays.
Two notable Asian film scholars offer an admirable overview of more than a century’s worth of Chinese film history – including the diaspora represented by films from Taiwan, Hong Kong and even the United States – starring internationally recognized actors and filmmakers such as Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Ang Lee.
With the relaxing of government controls in the 1980s, Taiwanese filmmakers quickly established themselves internationally. Four directors, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee (whom we claim as one of our APA own), and Tsai Ming-liang get closely examined here.
Through close readings of “nativist” Taiwanese literature of the 1960s and 1970s and of the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, Yip offers a distinct national Taiwanese identity independent of historical Chinese control and the further influx of Japanese and Western influences.
A compilation of 14 essays that highlight the experiences of a group of elite Chinese soldiers who were trained at China’s first modern military institution, Whampoa Military Academy, who were exiled … in numbers exceeding over a million … to Taiwan after fighting the Japanese in World War II. Seen through the eyes of the exiles’ descendants, many of whom are prominent writers in Taiwan, the essays capture the historically tense relationship that still exists between mainland China and neighboring Taiwan.
The concept of “Western modernity” traveling east throughout Asia, as it is reflected in the contemporary cinemas of Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
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