Throwaway Daughter

Dong-Mei also known as Grace Parker, was left on the steps of an orphanage in China. Luckily, a kind family in Canada was looking for another child to add in their family and decided to look for one but it wasn't easy. Lots of orphanages didn't accept the Parkers offer as supposedly, a family couldn't adopt a child if they already have one. When the Parkers finally located the orphanage in China, after lots of paperwork and tons of time, a picture of the baby girl they were adopting was sent to Canada. As Grace adapted to her family in Canada, she always hated the thought of her birth mother. How she had abandoned her, but as she thought of it more and more, she wanted to meet her mother to figure out why. Thus Grace begins her long journey in her teen years across the world to locate her mother. A quest that takes her to China but what she discovers will change her life forever.

Grace Dong-Mei Parker was adopted from a Chinese orphanage by Canadian parents, and despite their well-meaning efforts, she's adamantly opposed to having anything to do with her Chinese heritage. The sense of identity that language lessons and lunches in Chinatown never accomplish, happens dramatically when she witnesses a news broadcast of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and results in her return to China at the age of twenty to try to track down her birth parents. The circumstances of her birth and abandoment comes out gradually, from several points of view.Despite being nominated for the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults, this reads like adult fiction to me, especially with the complexity of the narrative (multiple points of view and timeshifts--but it's not as confusing as it sounds). Adjectives include lyrical, bittersweet and Canadian.