I read this book with a mixture of fascination and horror. The author of Throwaway Daughter, Ting-Xing Le, lived through the Cultural Revolution in China and worked as a translator before defecting to the West. (Her life story is told in her memoir A Leaf in the Bitter Wind.)
Throwaway Daughter, however, is a novel about a Chinese girl adopted to Canada who goes back to look for her Chinese family. The American Library Association listed it on its Best Books for Young Adults, but I would warn parents against giving this volume to children. Parents should read it first and then decide whether to read it together with their older child.
In the book the protagonist, Grace Dong-mei, is nineteen and an adopted Chinese-Canadian. Most Chinese-American adoptees are still children. The book says that adoption from China to Canada occurred before adoption from China to the U.S. became common. I cannot vouch for that. At least one adoptive parent of Chinese children has written that she found the book unrealistic as a portrayal of adoption and hopes that people will not get their adoption information from it. She urges them instead to read Kay Johnson’s nonfiction book Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son.
However, a novel can bring emotional understanding that nonfiction cannot. Perhaps it would be valuable to teen adoptees for that reason. The strength of this book is that chapters are written from alternating points of view including those of Grace, her adoptive mother, her birth mother, her birthfather, her paternal grandfather, and an orphanage worker. This is the first book I have seen that gives voice to a birth father and birth grandfather, fleshing out the circumstances leading to their actions, although it is hard to sympathize with these two characters.
The main action of the book takes place in 1999, when Grace goes to a summer institute in China and decides to search for her birth family. However, some chapters are flashbacks to 1980, the year of Grace’s birth, and 1989, when she is shocked by witnessing the Tienanmen Square Massacre on TV and agonizes over a family tree assignment in school.
Part of the book rang true to me. Grace originally resists learning her birth culture and language. Her mother urges her to, and also speaks of her birth family. But the mother admits that when Grace actually goes to China, she feels like a hypocrite. She has urged her daughter to learn about her heritage, but feels threatened and jealous when the time actually comes. I believe my daughters will meet their birthmother some day. I too wonder if I will be as fine with it when the time comes as I am in theory.
The book contains some very harsh themes—the suffering and starvation of the Cultural Revolution (including a family who must choose which of their children to feed and which to let die), female infanticide, and mental illness. The dynamics of the in-law relationships in the book are complicated. If this is in fact a young adult novel, it is definitely for older young adults, ideally with parental supervision. Part of me wishes I’d never read the book; part of me is glad I did because of the unique multiple perspectives offered.
Please see these related blogs:
Books for Adults on Adoption from China and Korea
Book Review: I Wish for You a Beautiful Life
Children’s Books on Adoption from China