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

As a person who knows a little girl who was adopted recently from Anhui province, I found this book very moving. Not only was it very beautiful and emotional, it also was very interesting. After reading it, I grew to love the characters, especially LuLu, TohToh, and JingJing, and felt like I knew them. The author did a wonderful job of telling this story.

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!

In Wuhu Diary, Emily Prager portrays China and the Chinese culture/people with sharp perceptiveness, sensitivity and a great sense of humor. Her role in China is as complex as her emotions: She is on the one hand a foreign tourist, an outsider of the Chinese society but on the other hand she is also the mother of a China-born girl, which inevitably makes her part of the Chinese scene. Her reflections and explorations of the deeper thoughts and emotions rendered by this contradicatory position are clear and poignant. She has eyes for things subtle enough that others would easily miss. I, a Chinese student studying in America, feel I have been reeducated by her book. I laughed hard when I read Wuhu Diary. I cried, too. It's a book that is both enjoyable and informational. It is a must read for people who are interested in the Chinese culture and especially people who have adopted, are adopting or will adopt a child from mainland China.

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.

This is a beautiful book. It is warm and loving, a mother's love story actually. I am also a mother of a Chinese daughter and I found this book an honest and fascinating discussion of the formation of identity as well as an evocative memoir with whichmost mothers of children from China can easily identify. Prager's daughter reminded me very much of my own daughter and the struggles she has gone through and that was the consensus of my adoptive mother friends who read it too.