Moving account of a young woman reuniting with her birth family. I enjoyed this book and found the author's struggles to assimilate to her Chinese family to be interesting and compelling. ( )

Seems like the book could of ended halfway through. The second half was a more in-depth look at the first half with some added details or events. At first I wasn't taken with Hopgood's journalistic writing style, it's not the most evoking style for what should be an emotional journey. But later it was the restraint which made the sappy storyline tolerable.

Still something about the author seemed faked or hidden - which is to be expected in an autobiography which includes all of your living family members. Hopgood sure delves a lot into how much she cares about her "birth family" and doesn't discuss much about how little they matter, an ascertation you can glean from her actions. ( )

Lucky Girl is a memoir about what it's like to have been adopted and to be able to go back and attempt to rejoin one's birth family, and especially what it's like to have two families from such different cultures and classes. The story isn't so much about China or America specifically, but about family.

It was an interesting read, which I finished in 2 days - much more quickly than some others I've been pushing myself to finish recently, so I can't say that I didn't enjoy reading it. I do think that it was a bit uneven, though, when it came to some of the family-history revelations. Sometimes, it seemed like Mei-Ling wanted to add drama to the narrative with the revelations, the same way she learned of them, but then she undercuts it by having revealed the details earlier in the book.

I actually found it a little harder to identify with Mei-Ling's American family than her Chinese birth family, because while I expected to have very little in common with the Wangs, whereas the Hopgoods were advertised as All-American, and how could I not be familiar with that, due to television and books and so on? But I found that with the family drama and large number of siblings, the Wang family felt more real to me - even if life in rural Taiwan is very, very different to my life in Florida. But the Hopgood family were depicted through rose-colored nostalgia and was a little too All-American and a little too good to be true, though I understand that this is partly due to the way Mei-Ling was trying to underscore the differences in her two families, partly due to grief for her recently deceased father, and partly because (as she tells us in the book) she spent most of her life rejecting her birth heritage and trying to be as All-American as she could be.

Overall, though, I'm glad I spent the time reading the book, and I think that if you are interested in this kind of memoir, it's definitely worth a try. I'm probably not the best reader for it!

(Note: there are references to infanticide and child neglect, due to the Confucian society, which also means plenty of misogyny. I feel that it's big enough that it warrants a trigger warning.) ( )

I feel very guilty for having missed reviewing this for so long, but what can I say... twins happened! This was a fairly quick read about Mei Ling, a girl who was adopted from Taiwan by a midwest family, in one of the first international adoptions. She lived a happy life; her adoptive parents loved her and her two adopted Korean brothers immensely, and she never gave her birth family much of a thought until they contacted her, requesting a meeting. The memoir touches on the conflicting emotions and cultural differences that she experiences, as she makes the journey to Asia to meet her birth family. I really enjoyed this book, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys memoirs or who is interested in the subject of international adoption or adoption in general. ( )

Really excellent exploration of being Asian in America, being adopted, discovering a long-lost family and what it is to be a sister and daughter. Well written, too ( )