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Table of Contents
About The Book
Meg Lindsay has everything a woman could want except happiness. Can an adopted Chinese child bring her what she lacks?
All her life, Meg Lindsay’s mother told her what a disappointment she was. Try as she might, Meg never measured up, and the emotional bruises still hurt as an adult. In Meg’s opinion, no one could be a worse mother than the woman who gave birth to her—that is, until Meg has a child of her own to care for.
Two young girls lived in an orphanage in China. Unwanted because of a deformity and the lack of family registry, Little Zhen An was destined to spend her childhood in the orphanage. Her only friend was a slightly older blind girl, Wen Ming.
After Meg and her husband, Lewis, adopt one of the girls, Meg’s love for her new daughter grows daily, but the tension, fear, and uncertainty of motherhood drive Meg to the brink of despair. Fearing that she is becoming the kind of mother she hates, she fights circumstance, rebellion, a loving but at times tense marriage, setbacks, and the native selfishness that lives in all of us.
Meg’s journey is a magical one as East meets West and as imagination aligns with reality. Lucky Baby spans the world, bridges the gap between heart and soul, and shows that the greatest power on Earth is forgiveness.
All her life, Meg Lindsay’s mother told her what a disappointment she was. Try as she might, Meg never measured up, and the emotional bruises still hurt as an adult. In Meg’s opinion, no one could be a worse mother than the woman who gave birth to her—that is, until Meg has a child of her own to care for.
Two young girls lived in an orphanage in China. Unwanted because of a deformity and the lack of family registry, Little Zhen An was destined to spend her childhood in the orphanage. Her only friend was a slightly older blind girl, Wen Ming.
After Meg and her husband, Lewis, adopt one of the girls, Meg’s love for her new daughter grows daily, but the tension, fear, and uncertainty of motherhood drive Meg to the brink of despair. Fearing that she is becoming the kind of mother she hates, she fights circumstance, rebellion, a loving but at times tense marriage, setbacks, and the native selfishness that lives in all of us.
Meg’s journey is a magical one as East meets West and as imagination aligns with reality. Lucky Baby spans the world, bridges the gap between heart and soul, and shows that the greatest power on Earth is forgiveness.
Excerpt
Lucky Baby PROLOGUE
Wen Ming, April 2001
The woman of my earliest memory has no body. Just a round face with skin like a plum. Smooth and tight. Firm. A smiling plum with dimples. She is not my mama. I don’t remember my mama.
Many years later, now that I am nearly grown, there are other things I remember. They are only pieces, like torn bits of a blurred photo. Sometimes I don’t know what is real memory and what my mind has filled in for me, but I think most of our lives happen in our minds, so it doesn’t bother me.
I remember a misty rain that smelled like the ocean and dead earthworms; massive concrete steps and the ache in my legs as I climbed them; the fuzzy nubs of my blanket, and its unchanging odor of old sun-dried sheets, steamed rice, and sour water. The blanket corner caught a step and I tripped. The woman grabbed my hand tighter and told me, “You should be more careful. Now hurry.”
We did.
Not the hurry of going to the park for tai chi. Not the hurry of getting to the market before all the best fish were taken. Not the hurry of peeling off my many layers of clothing to squat over the toilet. Those normal sorts of hurry never turned my fingers into clammy, day-old rice noodles, never set an eel to swimming in my stomach. This hurry was the nightmare that chased me down dark alleys in my mind and swallowed me with its nothingness.
I was too small to fight it, but I did drag my feet. She tugged my arm. I shuffled after her. I had no choice.
Lots of hallways. Dim and musty, damp. The voices of a man and a woman—this woman with the perfect plum skin.
“You are not allowed to leave a child here. This is a police station, not an orphanage. She cannot stay. It’s against the law.”
“She isn’t my child.”
“She has been living with you?”
“I … took her in when her mother … actually, I don’t know her parents.”
“This was how long ago?”
“She’ll be three in July.”
“What sort of mother would give up her child after almost three years? She is that much trouble to you?” The man laughed and ruffled my hair, as if I were nothing more than a dog to be scratched behind the ears. Sharp teeth bared in my heart, and I pulled away from him with a silent growl. The woman jerked my hand and made me stand closer to her.
“I am not her mother!” Her anxiety flowed from her hand through mine, up my arm and to my heart, leaving a trail of numbing coldness. “It isn’t that I don’t care for the child. But she is not registered, she has no hukou. She is going blind …”
I felt the man’s hand under my chin. He lifted my face, his touch more gentle than before. He was a towering shadow of dull greens and grays. “You should have gotten a hukou for her. You should not have been so foolish.”
The woman said nothing. In my mind, now, I am sorry for this memory woman. It is a shameful thing to give up a child, even one who is not your own. She could not save face. Not when she’d taken me in illegally. Not when she was too poor to care for a child going blind.
“I could have left her in a restroom. She doesn’t talk yet. I brought her here because she would be safe. You think I’m a bad person?” Her voice sounded like the never-ending shrill of Shanghai traffic. “I’m not a bad person. My husband’s parents—they are the ones who went back on their word. Our parents think a girl with poor eyesight is not worth it. So how can I afford for her to go to a doctor? Am I to lose my job and do nothing but care for a blind child? Who will pay for that? Would you have us all end up on the streets? I’m a good person and a hard worker. My husband is also. We want a healthy child, just like anybody.”
Her words made me thin, translucent, a sheet of paper about to be crumpled and thrown in the trash. A sheet of paper scribbled with unwantedness.
The man did not speak right away. Maybe he did not agree with the woman. Maybe he did not find me unwanted. But if he disagreed, why did he not speak?
I held tightly to the woman’s hand. I do not know if I loved her, but if she let go, if she left me, I’d be alone in my world of shadows. Already, the dark seemed to creep under my skin, separating me from my own body. I wiggled my fingers and toes, but they didn’t seem to be mine to control.
“Please,” she whispered. “I was going to register her when we took her in, but we never had enough money. My husband’s parents promised to help pay for the hukou, until they found out she was a girl. Now they are angry because we have a girl who is going blind. And who else will take her? You can understand.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the man to be unmoved by her pleading. To be untouched by her humiliation. To not understand.
After many moments, when he tried to speak, his voice sounded choked and thick like old sesame oil. “On her papers, I will write that you found her and brought her here. I won’t say anything about the rest.”
For the first time, the woman’s hand slackened. She let go of me and opened her purse. “Thank you. I have her birth date too, for her papers.”
My breath came in tiny pulses, like the throb in a chicken’s neck the moment before it snaps.
Shadowed paper yuan traveled from her purse to his hand. He had shielded her not only from shame but also from legal trouble. That was worth a monetary gift, even from a woman who could not afford it. She knelt in front of me, a wide, forced smile stretching across her smooth skin.
“You’re going to a good place. Lots of other children. They’ll help your eyes there. It’s really the best thing for you.”
A tear on her cheek caught the light. I touched it and her smile wobbled. She laughed a little. “I wish I could go too! Lucky baby. You’ll have so much fun.”
I threw my arms around her and pressed my face against her neck, where her skin was softest and smelled like soap. She held me, and a sob ripped through her, through us both.
She tore herself from me. Disappeared into shadows. I heard the rapid squeaking of her rubber-soled shoes echoing down the corridor as she made her escape.
I lunged to follow. The man’s arms snapped around me and I screamed. I kicked and thrashed, but he was so much stronger than I. He told me not to be a naughty baby, to hush and be good. I don’t think he meant to be unkind. He held me against him, rubbing my back and bouncing me. His heart beat very fast. And his hands trembled. For his sake, I tried to stop crying. I wanted to be good.
The aunties who work at the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Home think I was too young to remember this. They say I made it up. A child of two and a half years could never have such a memory, they insist. But this I remember—I know it happened, not just in my mind. I know it was real.
Is this a thing a child could forget?
Lucky Baby ONE
Meg Lindsay
I watch her sleep. The turbulent energy of day has given way to the Elysian simplicity of night. I brush her pink lips with my thumb and her still-childish cheeks with my fingers. Her skin is the softness of every gentle memory and warm sensation I have ever known. It’s all there, in touching her. She will never know how many nights I’ve done this—stolen into her room to watch her—hungrily, desperately trying to fill the hole inside myself with her. I can’t love enough, can’t want enough, can’t get enough of her. The little hands; the messy, sweaty hair; the delicate skin of her eyelids. I never asked for this love, never expected it to be such an unsatisfied pain inside. But now I crave it, no matter how it devours me, no matter if it destroys me, I need to love her. I want to love her.
I never wanted this.
I never wanted to be a mom. There’s the cold, hard truth of it. Lots of people thought it was because I’m self-centered and too career-focused. Lots of people thought it was because I didn’t like children. Lots of people thought it was because I must be infertile.
Lots of people were wrong.
From my earliest memories, “mother” has meant the woman who criticizes, who critiques my every move, who is never satisfied or totally pleased. A mother is someone who loves only if you do what she wants. With a mother, you’re always one step away from emotional abandonment, from becoming an orphan of the heart.
So why would I want to become that person? Why would I want to do that to an innocent child? I don’t dislike children. I dislike mothers.
Why would I ever choose to become what I dislike?
And yet, that’s exactly what I did. I’m not saying my motives were right. I know they were not. But every revolution, every paradigm shift has a catalyst. A shove. A compelling reason to risk everything to find a new path, to change.
My shove, my catalyst, was my mother.
March 2005
“Tell me again why we’re doing this.” My husband, Lewis, guided our car into my parents’ driveway and shut off the engine.
I stared out the window at the prosy March Sunday, pedestrian as a Schoenberg string quartet. “Because I haven’t seen my sister in two years?” She’d been in France and had only returned home two days ago.
Lewis lifted his eyebrows in an is-that-the-best-you-can-come-up-with expression.
“I know, I know.” I leaned my head against the back of the seat. “How about this one? We’re doing this because I still harbor the thoroughly unrealistic hope that my parents will change if I do the good-daughter thing long enough.”
He opened his door and ducked out of the car. “Give you points for honesty, anyway. Let’s go do this.”
“Besides, I’m going to talk to them about the savings account. I want to use it to pay off my grad school loans.”
He stopped in the middle of the driveway, bringing me to a halt behind him. “Seriously? You’re going to bring that up today?”
“Why not today? I’ve chickened out for six months. I’m disgusting myself.”
“I’ve told you, we don’t need it. If you bring it up, it will be wedding mess Act Two. We’re fine.”
“It’s my debt and it’s hanging over both our heads, and that’s not right. They created a savings account for me, and there’s no reason why it can’t go toward something as responsible and practical as paying off debt. It’s not like I want to blow it on a cruise or something.”
Lewis put his arm around my waist. “I just don’t think it’s worth the trouble. You can’t bring it up without reminding them that the money was supposed to pay for your wedding—to Adam, not to me. They’ve only been talking to us again the last six months. And if you screw it up, I don’t think I’ll be able to fix it with another sob-story letter.”
“So it was my fault?”
I started to pull away, but he tightened his grip on me and pressed a kiss against my temple. “That’s not what I meant. I just don’t want you hurt again.”
“Me neither.”
My mother eased open the door and watched Lewis and me make our way up the brick walk to the trilevel suburban house where I grew up, her smile so warm and hospitable, I once again believed in it for a second. For one blinding, glorious, faith-filled second the world in my heart seemed to match the world outside.
“Meggie!”
She waved at me and I headed for her warmth like a kid goat tottering toward its dam. My mom. Mine, mine, mine. Finally I was close enough to touch her. I leaned into the doorway to fill my arms with mother love.
She gave me a one-armed hug, the other arm holding open the beveled glass storm door. “I was hoping you were Beth.”
Of course she was. “She’s not here?”
“She went to pick up a … friend.” My mother suddenly looked like she’d secretly eaten an entire bowl of brownie batter. But she didn’t elaborate as she let us through the door.
We trudged up four carpeted steps and into the living room, where everything was cloyingly symmetrical and perfect in shades of rose, peach, and wine. While my dad gave me an airy hug encompassing all the empty space of the issues we never spoke about, my mom wrapped her arms around Lewis’s slim waist as if he was the best son-in-law a mom could ask for.
He patted her on the back. “Hi, Karen.” Looking over my mom’s head, he nodded at my dad. “Doug.”
My mom stepped away, and no one but I caught the subtle glance of distaste she shot at my husband. She smoothed her palms down the skirt of her Sunday best, wiping away the touch of him. “Watch out, Mom,” I wanted to tell her, “atheism is catching.” But I’d never dare. She and Dad turned their backs on me five years ago when I married Lewis instead of Adam. Lewis’s letter to them had been a masterpiece of pleading and scolding and negotiation—their letting me back into their lives in exchange for his backside in a pew at our church every week. The ultimately ironic sacrifice of love. It had purchased a fragile reconciliation for me, and I wasn’t about to throw it away.
“Aunt Meg!” The screech accompanied a thud against the backs of my knees.
Lewis steadied me. I glanced over my shoulder and down at the brown-haired preschooler pressing his face between my legs. “Hi, Jakey. Where’s your brother?”
He tipped his head up to shrug at me. “Sammie’s playing. I told him to come say hi but he didn’t listen.”
“Little brothers are like that.”
“Like what?” My little brother sauntered into the room, towering over my own five feet nine inches. He barely nodded at Lewis.
“Pesky. Annoying.”
He jabbed my arm lightly, grinning. “If so, we learned it from our older siblings.”
Jakey transferred his grasp to my brother’s left leg. “Dad! Come see my Lego tower.”
Joe hoisted the three-year-old into his arms and smiled at me. He loved being a dad. He was the hero, the king, and the object of his sons’ worship. There was triumph in that smile. Invincibility too, as if he half believed the mythology his children had created.
A part of me wanted to punch him. Just to remind him that not all of us adored the very air he breathed. To some of us, he would always be a loved but pesky little brother who had been anything but heroic when his big sister needed it.
“Come on, Grandpa!”
My dad trotted after the duo. My mom had already bustled back into the kitchen, where my sister-in-law, Ellie, was helping get dinner ready. A big banner stretched above the dining table, reading, “Welcome Home Beth and Congratulations!”
Congratulations? For what? Surviving a two-year missionary tour of duty in southern France? Yes, she suffered so much. The Riviera Missionary—poor baby.
That was unfair of me. Maybe she didn’t suffer physical deprivation, but some of the French could be terribly unfriendly, especially to Christian missionaries. She’d been lonely, judging from her e-mails and phone calls to me.
“Meg!” my mom called. “We could use your help out here.”
I winced at the faint accusation. Lewis gave my hand a squeeze, and I leaned in for a kiss. Fortified, I left him standing in the living room, alone, looking as misplaced as he always did in my parents’ home.
Entering my mother’s kitchen, I saw Ellie whisking around, efficiently skirting my mom, as they performed the sort of ritualistic, meal-preparing dance that I had never quite mastered.
I stood on the threshold, trying not to feel the awkwardness welling inside me. “What can I do to help?”
I should have known the dance by now. Ellie didn’t have to ask. She just did. And whatever she did was usually right.
Mom handed me a bowl and a short “Here, grate cheese.” I shuttled off to a corner of the island counter, feeling like an inept eight-year-old. Grating cheese is what you make kids do when they can’t be trusted to do anything else. Everyone knows that.
If a stranger were to walk into our kitchen at that moment, he would have thought Ellie was the daughter of the house, and I was a newly minted in-law. Ellie and my mother laughed and chatted together about the clever things her boys said and made plans to go shopping.
“We’ll have lots to shop for,” my mom told her, “especially now that Beth is home.”
I supposed they meant for Beth’s apartment. At twenty-eight, she’d hardly want to live with her parents for long—even if she had the sort of cozy relationship with them I could only dream of.
Ellie grinned. “Thanks for including me in all of it.”
“Well, of course. You’re family.” She gave Ellie a hug.
My sister-in-law caught my eye, and her smile grew plastic and pinched. At least she was nice enough to look uncomfortable on my behalf. She pulled back from my mom. “So Meg, how’s the symphony going?”
The Nouveau Chicago Symphony—a rebel ensemble of musicians wanting to play crowd favorites and new composers instead of the “moldy oldies.” I was a charter member on my viola, eking out a meager salary as a principal player. My parents had never attended a performance, but Ellie and Joe liked it on occasion, if the tickets were free.
“Great. In fact, I was going to see if either of you wanted a season pass for next fall.”
Ellie shrugged and nodded. “Have to ask Joe, but I think that would be fun. If we can find babysitters.”
I took a breath. “Mom? You interested?”
She had to be interested. Just for once, be interested in something I did.
She reached into the fridge to pull out a fruit salad. “I doubt it, honey. We have some serious reservations about that group.”
Even Ellie looked startled. “About the Nouveau Symphony? Why?”
“They play music from movies we don’t approve of. And I read that their guest composer this year was Sam Chesterfield.”
Oh, she was upset about dear Sam, was she? “Sam’s a terrific composer.”
“He’s a gay activist.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with his orchestral music.”
“Of course it does! There are evil spiritual forces that attach themselves to the music while it’s being composed. I just don’t think it’s right for someone claiming to be a Christian to support gay music or music from rated-R movies.”
Ellie wouldn’t look at me. She and Joe would still probably take a season pass, but she wasn’t the sort to get between my mother and me in an argument.
“Okay, whatever. I was just offering. It’d be nice to actually have some support from my parents.”
“I’m not being judgmental or anything, Meggie, but I’m right—these things do have an impact on us. Look at you—I really do think that if you had directed your musical interest in a more God-honoring direction, you wouldn’t have rebelled like you did and ended up in a godless marriage. You should have stuck to playing on the church worship team.”
Ellie bit her lip, glancing at me with pity in her eyes. “I think I hear Jakey calling for me.” She rushed from the kitchen.
“Could we maybe not have these conversations in front of Ellie?” I handed Mom the bowl of grated cheese. “She shouldn’t be dragged into it.”
“You’re the one that asked about tickets. I was just explaining why I said no.” She set the bowl on the counter and then stirred the gravy simmering on the stove.
What had I thought? That I could soften her up by offering season passes to something she’d never had any appreciation for? She’d always suspected anything beyond hymns and gospel music was the realm of the devil. If it hadn’t been for my dad’s mother, I would have grown up plinking out “Faith Is the Victory” on the piano instead of falling in love with the viola and the world of the symphony. Grandma was the only person who could intimidate my mother. She paid for my instruments and my lessons, and attended all my recitals and performances until she became too sick to leave the nursing home. She died two years ago. There was still an emptiness inside me where she ought to have been.
There’d be no softening of my mother. If I said I wanted my savings account to pay off graduate school debt, she’d respond that if I hadn’t gone to grad school in the first place, there’d be no debt to pay off. And if I’d married Adam Harris the Future Pastor, as I’d been engaged to do, instead of Lewis Lindsay the Atheist Physicist, as I’d done five years ago, then I’d have received the savings account money and wouldn’t have to be asking for it now.
No, there was no scenario in which this was going to go smoothly. Might as well just jump in. “Hey, Mom? I was wondering about my savings account. How much is in there these days?”
She stopped whisking the gravy and stood motionless at the stove, her back to me. “Why are you asking now?”
I swallowed hard, my mouth dry. Brazen it out. “Just curious. I’d like to talk to you and Dad about transferring it into my name.”
The whisking started up again. Her voice sounded deceptively cordial. “Why?”
Arms crossed, I pinched the soft skin on the insides of my elbows. The sharp pain stopped my heart from racing and cleared my head. I kept my voice calm and low. Respectful. “You had a savings account set up for each of us kids. The last I knew, we each had over twenty thousand. For when we got married. Joe got his. I’m married now. I’d like to have mine. Please.”
My mother was silent for a moment. The whisking stilled again, and then resumed more briskly. I saw the tension in her shoulders and neck. “I’m sorry, dear”—still the same cheerful tone—“we had to use that money for other things, since you didn’t need it for a wedding.”
The sound of the front door opening choked off my bitter reply. Mom pushed past me and hurried toward the entryway, calling a greeting to my sister. I followed her into the rush of voices and movement at the door.
It was all I could do not to shove my way forward to grab my baby sister in a hug. The five years that Mom and Dad had refused to speak to me, she’d never disowned me. She’d been the sole family member to defy them and attend my wedding. As the baby of the family, she’d gotten away with it. My brother and Ellie had been too scared to try. But Beth—she’d actually been happy for me. Relieved, even. As if she’d known how unhappy I was with Adam.
“Meg!” she squealed, lurching forward and catching me up in her arms.
I squeezed her tight and closed my eyes. “I missed you!”
“Not as much as I missed you!” She turned her mouth toward my ear to whisper, “I’m so glad you’re here.”
I opened my eyes and looked over her shoulder at another person standing behind her. It was his hair I saw first. That dark, nameless sort of blond that I would have taken great pleasure in calling “dirty dishwater”—except that my real hair color was similar and I hid it with light ash color and golden lowlights. A hot-cold, sick sort of shiver sped through me.
I hated that hair, always cropped and styled so neatly, so rigidly. Countless times, I’d run my fingers through its thick softness only to be told I was messing it up and that there shouldn’t be much touching until we were married. To this day, I’m convinced Adam Harris loved his hair far more than he loved me—which would not have been a problem if he had been engaged to marry his hair instead of me.
And now the hair—and presumably the man beneath it—was standing in the entryway of my parents’ home, its presence stripping away the years. It seemed so natural, so right, so obvious for him to be here as he had been so many times before. The here-and-now was suddenly anachronistic—he’d apparently been the “friend” Beth had brought—and Lewis and Ellie were within the family circle while Adam hovered on the fringe.
I stepped back from my sister. The room grew stiflingly quiet. Adam’s lips scrunched into a tight smile. “Hello, Meg.”
“Hi?” I hadn’t meant for it to sound like a question, but it was all I could manage beyond blinking at him.
My mother pushed past me. “Move out from the middle of the walkway, Meg.” She touched Adam’s arm, drawing him farther into the room. “It’s so wonderful to see you, honey. We would have had you over right when you got home, but Beth said you were sleeping off jet lag. Are you feeling better now?”
“Much better, thanks.” He had the chutzpah to walk right up to Lewis and extend his hand. “Lewis, right? I don’t think we ever formally met. I’m Adam Harris.”
Lewis shook his hand, his face carefully blank. This was a farce, a nightmarish farce.
Was no one going to explain why my ex-fiancé was standing in my parents’ living room? I felt like a cork that had been shoved down a wine bottle’s neck, the only way of escape now too small for me to fit through. The smell of those memories, aging for more than five years, was the worst sort of wine—the sort that swallows the air and makes clear thought impossible.
Lewis walked to me and slipped his arms around my waist. I felt tension in him, but he kissed my ear and whispered, “Do you want to leave?”
I shook my head. There was something important happening and it seemed I ought to understand what it was, but my mind had become a stray dog—matted, trembling, and futilely chasing its tail.
Everyone started talking at once, but none of it made sense. The sound pressed hard around me, saturating the air, filling all my pores, heavier and heavier—
“Someone tell me what he’s doing here!”
My shout cleared the air, silencing the noise. I hadn’t meant to yell. It was all making me crazy.
My sister sidled up to me and took my hand. “He’s not a bad person.” Her voice was soft, pleading, like when we were young and she was trying to talk her way out of having broken the headphones for my Walkman.
“I know.”
“I always liked him. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. I suspected. But—”
“We were on the same team in France.”
“I thought he was in Haiti.”
Adam just watched the two of us, shifting on his feet.
“He was, until after you …”
Broke up with him. “And then?”
“He went to France, and I followed him there.”
She shot him a look of pure admiration, and suddenly I knew exactly what she was going to say next.
“We’re getting married, Meg! You have to be happy for us.”
“I …” I wanted to say the words she needed from me. There was so much hope and trust in her eyes. But a spiny knot twisted in my heart. This was why she’d been so supportive when I’d married Lewis instead of Adam. It hadn’t been about me at all. It had been about her. “Congratulations, sis.” I tried very hard not to spit out the words.
Suddenly the banner made sense. Everyone else already knew, except Lewis and me. It was hard to breathe.
Beth threw her arms around me. “I knew you’d understand. Mom didn’t think you would, but I knew you couldn’t help but be happy for us! I want you to be my matron of honor, okay?”
“When?” I hadn’t meant for it to sound like an assent, but she gave me another happy squeeze.
“Thank you!” She grabbed both my hands. “Mom and Dad have been great about the whole thing. Just wait till you hear! They talked the church board into hiring Adam as associate pastor. And they’re paying for the whole wedding, and our honeymoon, and a down payment on a house! I had no idea we had that much in our savings accounts, did you?”
I met my mother’s eyes and read the heartless truth in them. “Had to use that money for other things,” did they? Like securing the only son-in-law they’d ever really wanted. Like rewarding Beth for being the kind of daughter they approved of. It wasn’t the money itself. If they’d asked me if they could use it to help Beth—and even Adam—I’d have readily agreed.
It was the coldness of it all. The spite and spark of glee in my mother’s eyes. I couldn’t look away. She was relishing it—this moment when she got to stick it to me in front of everyone. I’d embarrassed her horribly when I’d thrown over the seminary graduate for the scientist. And she was going to make sure I got my punishment at every opportunity.
I stumbled down the steps to the front door. My hand grasped the knob.
“Meg!” My mother’s voice froze me. “If you leave now, you will never come back. Do you understand?”
I squeezed the doorknob, leaning my weight against it, my breath coming in heaves. My family or my freedom? Inclusion or self-respect? Why did I even have to choose?
A touch on my arm. I looked up into Lewis’s brown eyes. They were soft, glimmering with concern. He gave me a tiny shake of his head. He knew what it was like to have almost no family. It was why he’d been willing to do anything to help me reconcile with mine. I couldn’t throw that away.
I let go of the doorknob. For him. He put his arm around my waist and led me upstairs. I wouldn’t look at my mother. I didn’t want to see the triumph in her smile.
Wen Ming, April 2001
The woman of my earliest memory has no body. Just a round face with skin like a plum. Smooth and tight. Firm. A smiling plum with dimples. She is not my mama. I don’t remember my mama.
Many years later, now that I am nearly grown, there are other things I remember. They are only pieces, like torn bits of a blurred photo. Sometimes I don’t know what is real memory and what my mind has filled in for me, but I think most of our lives happen in our minds, so it doesn’t bother me.
I remember a misty rain that smelled like the ocean and dead earthworms; massive concrete steps and the ache in my legs as I climbed them; the fuzzy nubs of my blanket, and its unchanging odor of old sun-dried sheets, steamed rice, and sour water. The blanket corner caught a step and I tripped. The woman grabbed my hand tighter and told me, “You should be more careful. Now hurry.”
We did.
Not the hurry of going to the park for tai chi. Not the hurry of getting to the market before all the best fish were taken. Not the hurry of peeling off my many layers of clothing to squat over the toilet. Those normal sorts of hurry never turned my fingers into clammy, day-old rice noodles, never set an eel to swimming in my stomach. This hurry was the nightmare that chased me down dark alleys in my mind and swallowed me with its nothingness.
I was too small to fight it, but I did drag my feet. She tugged my arm. I shuffled after her. I had no choice.
Lots of hallways. Dim and musty, damp. The voices of a man and a woman—this woman with the perfect plum skin.
“You are not allowed to leave a child here. This is a police station, not an orphanage. She cannot stay. It’s against the law.”
“She isn’t my child.”
“She has been living with you?”
“I … took her in when her mother … actually, I don’t know her parents.”
“This was how long ago?”
“She’ll be three in July.”
“What sort of mother would give up her child after almost three years? She is that much trouble to you?” The man laughed and ruffled my hair, as if I were nothing more than a dog to be scratched behind the ears. Sharp teeth bared in my heart, and I pulled away from him with a silent growl. The woman jerked my hand and made me stand closer to her.
“I am not her mother!” Her anxiety flowed from her hand through mine, up my arm and to my heart, leaving a trail of numbing coldness. “It isn’t that I don’t care for the child. But she is not registered, she has no hukou. She is going blind …”
I felt the man’s hand under my chin. He lifted my face, his touch more gentle than before. He was a towering shadow of dull greens and grays. “You should have gotten a hukou for her. You should not have been so foolish.”
The woman said nothing. In my mind, now, I am sorry for this memory woman. It is a shameful thing to give up a child, even one who is not your own. She could not save face. Not when she’d taken me in illegally. Not when she was too poor to care for a child going blind.
“I could have left her in a restroom. She doesn’t talk yet. I brought her here because she would be safe. You think I’m a bad person?” Her voice sounded like the never-ending shrill of Shanghai traffic. “I’m not a bad person. My husband’s parents—they are the ones who went back on their word. Our parents think a girl with poor eyesight is not worth it. So how can I afford for her to go to a doctor? Am I to lose my job and do nothing but care for a blind child? Who will pay for that? Would you have us all end up on the streets? I’m a good person and a hard worker. My husband is also. We want a healthy child, just like anybody.”
Her words made me thin, translucent, a sheet of paper about to be crumpled and thrown in the trash. A sheet of paper scribbled with unwantedness.
The man did not speak right away. Maybe he did not agree with the woman. Maybe he did not find me unwanted. But if he disagreed, why did he not speak?
I held tightly to the woman’s hand. I do not know if I loved her, but if she let go, if she left me, I’d be alone in my world of shadows. Already, the dark seemed to creep under my skin, separating me from my own body. I wiggled my fingers and toes, but they didn’t seem to be mine to control.
“Please,” she whispered. “I was going to register her when we took her in, but we never had enough money. My husband’s parents promised to help pay for the hukou, until they found out she was a girl. Now they are angry because we have a girl who is going blind. And who else will take her? You can understand.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the man to be unmoved by her pleading. To be untouched by her humiliation. To not understand.
After many moments, when he tried to speak, his voice sounded choked and thick like old sesame oil. “On her papers, I will write that you found her and brought her here. I won’t say anything about the rest.”
For the first time, the woman’s hand slackened. She let go of me and opened her purse. “Thank you. I have her birth date too, for her papers.”
My breath came in tiny pulses, like the throb in a chicken’s neck the moment before it snaps.
Shadowed paper yuan traveled from her purse to his hand. He had shielded her not only from shame but also from legal trouble. That was worth a monetary gift, even from a woman who could not afford it. She knelt in front of me, a wide, forced smile stretching across her smooth skin.
“You’re going to a good place. Lots of other children. They’ll help your eyes there. It’s really the best thing for you.”
A tear on her cheek caught the light. I touched it and her smile wobbled. She laughed a little. “I wish I could go too! Lucky baby. You’ll have so much fun.”
I threw my arms around her and pressed my face against her neck, where her skin was softest and smelled like soap. She held me, and a sob ripped through her, through us both.
She tore herself from me. Disappeared into shadows. I heard the rapid squeaking of her rubber-soled shoes echoing down the corridor as she made her escape.
I lunged to follow. The man’s arms snapped around me and I screamed. I kicked and thrashed, but he was so much stronger than I. He told me not to be a naughty baby, to hush and be good. I don’t think he meant to be unkind. He held me against him, rubbing my back and bouncing me. His heart beat very fast. And his hands trembled. For his sake, I tried to stop crying. I wanted to be good.
The aunties who work at the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Home think I was too young to remember this. They say I made it up. A child of two and a half years could never have such a memory, they insist. But this I remember—I know it happened, not just in my mind. I know it was real.
Is this a thing a child could forget?
Lucky Baby ONE
Meg Lindsay
I watch her sleep. The turbulent energy of day has given way to the Elysian simplicity of night. I brush her pink lips with my thumb and her still-childish cheeks with my fingers. Her skin is the softness of every gentle memory and warm sensation I have ever known. It’s all there, in touching her. She will never know how many nights I’ve done this—stolen into her room to watch her—hungrily, desperately trying to fill the hole inside myself with her. I can’t love enough, can’t want enough, can’t get enough of her. The little hands; the messy, sweaty hair; the delicate skin of her eyelids. I never asked for this love, never expected it to be such an unsatisfied pain inside. But now I crave it, no matter how it devours me, no matter if it destroys me, I need to love her. I want to love her.
I never wanted this.
I never wanted to be a mom. There’s the cold, hard truth of it. Lots of people thought it was because I’m self-centered and too career-focused. Lots of people thought it was because I didn’t like children. Lots of people thought it was because I must be infertile.
Lots of people were wrong.
From my earliest memories, “mother” has meant the woman who criticizes, who critiques my every move, who is never satisfied or totally pleased. A mother is someone who loves only if you do what she wants. With a mother, you’re always one step away from emotional abandonment, from becoming an orphan of the heart.
So why would I want to become that person? Why would I want to do that to an innocent child? I don’t dislike children. I dislike mothers.
Why would I ever choose to become what I dislike?
And yet, that’s exactly what I did. I’m not saying my motives were right. I know they were not. But every revolution, every paradigm shift has a catalyst. A shove. A compelling reason to risk everything to find a new path, to change.
My shove, my catalyst, was my mother.
March 2005
“Tell me again why we’re doing this.” My husband, Lewis, guided our car into my parents’ driveway and shut off the engine.
I stared out the window at the prosy March Sunday, pedestrian as a Schoenberg string quartet. “Because I haven’t seen my sister in two years?” She’d been in France and had only returned home two days ago.
Lewis lifted his eyebrows in an is-that-the-best-you-can-come-up-with expression.
“I know, I know.” I leaned my head against the back of the seat. “How about this one? We’re doing this because I still harbor the thoroughly unrealistic hope that my parents will change if I do the good-daughter thing long enough.”
He opened his door and ducked out of the car. “Give you points for honesty, anyway. Let’s go do this.”
“Besides, I’m going to talk to them about the savings account. I want to use it to pay off my grad school loans.”
He stopped in the middle of the driveway, bringing me to a halt behind him. “Seriously? You’re going to bring that up today?”
“Why not today? I’ve chickened out for six months. I’m disgusting myself.”
“I’ve told you, we don’t need it. If you bring it up, it will be wedding mess Act Two. We’re fine.”
“It’s my debt and it’s hanging over both our heads, and that’s not right. They created a savings account for me, and there’s no reason why it can’t go toward something as responsible and practical as paying off debt. It’s not like I want to blow it on a cruise or something.”
Lewis put his arm around my waist. “I just don’t think it’s worth the trouble. You can’t bring it up without reminding them that the money was supposed to pay for your wedding—to Adam, not to me. They’ve only been talking to us again the last six months. And if you screw it up, I don’t think I’ll be able to fix it with another sob-story letter.”
“So it was my fault?”
I started to pull away, but he tightened his grip on me and pressed a kiss against my temple. “That’s not what I meant. I just don’t want you hurt again.”
“Me neither.”
My mother eased open the door and watched Lewis and me make our way up the brick walk to the trilevel suburban house where I grew up, her smile so warm and hospitable, I once again believed in it for a second. For one blinding, glorious, faith-filled second the world in my heart seemed to match the world outside.
“Meggie!”
She waved at me and I headed for her warmth like a kid goat tottering toward its dam. My mom. Mine, mine, mine. Finally I was close enough to touch her. I leaned into the doorway to fill my arms with mother love.
She gave me a one-armed hug, the other arm holding open the beveled glass storm door. “I was hoping you were Beth.”
Of course she was. “She’s not here?”
“She went to pick up a … friend.” My mother suddenly looked like she’d secretly eaten an entire bowl of brownie batter. But she didn’t elaborate as she let us through the door.
We trudged up four carpeted steps and into the living room, where everything was cloyingly symmetrical and perfect in shades of rose, peach, and wine. While my dad gave me an airy hug encompassing all the empty space of the issues we never spoke about, my mom wrapped her arms around Lewis’s slim waist as if he was the best son-in-law a mom could ask for.
He patted her on the back. “Hi, Karen.” Looking over my mom’s head, he nodded at my dad. “Doug.”
My mom stepped away, and no one but I caught the subtle glance of distaste she shot at my husband. She smoothed her palms down the skirt of her Sunday best, wiping away the touch of him. “Watch out, Mom,” I wanted to tell her, “atheism is catching.” But I’d never dare. She and Dad turned their backs on me five years ago when I married Lewis instead of Adam. Lewis’s letter to them had been a masterpiece of pleading and scolding and negotiation—their letting me back into their lives in exchange for his backside in a pew at our church every week. The ultimately ironic sacrifice of love. It had purchased a fragile reconciliation for me, and I wasn’t about to throw it away.
“Aunt Meg!” The screech accompanied a thud against the backs of my knees.
Lewis steadied me. I glanced over my shoulder and down at the brown-haired preschooler pressing his face between my legs. “Hi, Jakey. Where’s your brother?”
He tipped his head up to shrug at me. “Sammie’s playing. I told him to come say hi but he didn’t listen.”
“Little brothers are like that.”
“Like what?” My little brother sauntered into the room, towering over my own five feet nine inches. He barely nodded at Lewis.
“Pesky. Annoying.”
He jabbed my arm lightly, grinning. “If so, we learned it from our older siblings.”
Jakey transferred his grasp to my brother’s left leg. “Dad! Come see my Lego tower.”
Joe hoisted the three-year-old into his arms and smiled at me. He loved being a dad. He was the hero, the king, and the object of his sons’ worship. There was triumph in that smile. Invincibility too, as if he half believed the mythology his children had created.
A part of me wanted to punch him. Just to remind him that not all of us adored the very air he breathed. To some of us, he would always be a loved but pesky little brother who had been anything but heroic when his big sister needed it.
“Come on, Grandpa!”
My dad trotted after the duo. My mom had already bustled back into the kitchen, where my sister-in-law, Ellie, was helping get dinner ready. A big banner stretched above the dining table, reading, “Welcome Home Beth and Congratulations!”
Congratulations? For what? Surviving a two-year missionary tour of duty in southern France? Yes, she suffered so much. The Riviera Missionary—poor baby.
That was unfair of me. Maybe she didn’t suffer physical deprivation, but some of the French could be terribly unfriendly, especially to Christian missionaries. She’d been lonely, judging from her e-mails and phone calls to me.
“Meg!” my mom called. “We could use your help out here.”
I winced at the faint accusation. Lewis gave my hand a squeeze, and I leaned in for a kiss. Fortified, I left him standing in the living room, alone, looking as misplaced as he always did in my parents’ home.
Entering my mother’s kitchen, I saw Ellie whisking around, efficiently skirting my mom, as they performed the sort of ritualistic, meal-preparing dance that I had never quite mastered.
I stood on the threshold, trying not to feel the awkwardness welling inside me. “What can I do to help?”
I should have known the dance by now. Ellie didn’t have to ask. She just did. And whatever she did was usually right.
Mom handed me a bowl and a short “Here, grate cheese.” I shuttled off to a corner of the island counter, feeling like an inept eight-year-old. Grating cheese is what you make kids do when they can’t be trusted to do anything else. Everyone knows that.
If a stranger were to walk into our kitchen at that moment, he would have thought Ellie was the daughter of the house, and I was a newly minted in-law. Ellie and my mother laughed and chatted together about the clever things her boys said and made plans to go shopping.
“We’ll have lots to shop for,” my mom told her, “especially now that Beth is home.”
I supposed they meant for Beth’s apartment. At twenty-eight, she’d hardly want to live with her parents for long—even if she had the sort of cozy relationship with them I could only dream of.
Ellie grinned. “Thanks for including me in all of it.”
“Well, of course. You’re family.” She gave Ellie a hug.
My sister-in-law caught my eye, and her smile grew plastic and pinched. At least she was nice enough to look uncomfortable on my behalf. She pulled back from my mom. “So Meg, how’s the symphony going?”
The Nouveau Chicago Symphony—a rebel ensemble of musicians wanting to play crowd favorites and new composers instead of the “moldy oldies.” I was a charter member on my viola, eking out a meager salary as a principal player. My parents had never attended a performance, but Ellie and Joe liked it on occasion, if the tickets were free.
“Great. In fact, I was going to see if either of you wanted a season pass for next fall.”
Ellie shrugged and nodded. “Have to ask Joe, but I think that would be fun. If we can find babysitters.”
I took a breath. “Mom? You interested?”
She had to be interested. Just for once, be interested in something I did.
She reached into the fridge to pull out a fruit salad. “I doubt it, honey. We have some serious reservations about that group.”
Even Ellie looked startled. “About the Nouveau Symphony? Why?”
“They play music from movies we don’t approve of. And I read that their guest composer this year was Sam Chesterfield.”
Oh, she was upset about dear Sam, was she? “Sam’s a terrific composer.”
“He’s a gay activist.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with his orchestral music.”
“Of course it does! There are evil spiritual forces that attach themselves to the music while it’s being composed. I just don’t think it’s right for someone claiming to be a Christian to support gay music or music from rated-R movies.”
Ellie wouldn’t look at me. She and Joe would still probably take a season pass, but she wasn’t the sort to get between my mother and me in an argument.
“Okay, whatever. I was just offering. It’d be nice to actually have some support from my parents.”
“I’m not being judgmental or anything, Meggie, but I’m right—these things do have an impact on us. Look at you—I really do think that if you had directed your musical interest in a more God-honoring direction, you wouldn’t have rebelled like you did and ended up in a godless marriage. You should have stuck to playing on the church worship team.”
Ellie bit her lip, glancing at me with pity in her eyes. “I think I hear Jakey calling for me.” She rushed from the kitchen.
“Could we maybe not have these conversations in front of Ellie?” I handed Mom the bowl of grated cheese. “She shouldn’t be dragged into it.”
“You’re the one that asked about tickets. I was just explaining why I said no.” She set the bowl on the counter and then stirred the gravy simmering on the stove.
What had I thought? That I could soften her up by offering season passes to something she’d never had any appreciation for? She’d always suspected anything beyond hymns and gospel music was the realm of the devil. If it hadn’t been for my dad’s mother, I would have grown up plinking out “Faith Is the Victory” on the piano instead of falling in love with the viola and the world of the symphony. Grandma was the only person who could intimidate my mother. She paid for my instruments and my lessons, and attended all my recitals and performances until she became too sick to leave the nursing home. She died two years ago. There was still an emptiness inside me where she ought to have been.
There’d be no softening of my mother. If I said I wanted my savings account to pay off graduate school debt, she’d respond that if I hadn’t gone to grad school in the first place, there’d be no debt to pay off. And if I’d married Adam Harris the Future Pastor, as I’d been engaged to do, instead of Lewis Lindsay the Atheist Physicist, as I’d done five years ago, then I’d have received the savings account money and wouldn’t have to be asking for it now.
No, there was no scenario in which this was going to go smoothly. Might as well just jump in. “Hey, Mom? I was wondering about my savings account. How much is in there these days?”
She stopped whisking the gravy and stood motionless at the stove, her back to me. “Why are you asking now?”
I swallowed hard, my mouth dry. Brazen it out. “Just curious. I’d like to talk to you and Dad about transferring it into my name.”
The whisking started up again. Her voice sounded deceptively cordial. “Why?”
Arms crossed, I pinched the soft skin on the insides of my elbows. The sharp pain stopped my heart from racing and cleared my head. I kept my voice calm and low. Respectful. “You had a savings account set up for each of us kids. The last I knew, we each had over twenty thousand. For when we got married. Joe got his. I’m married now. I’d like to have mine. Please.”
My mother was silent for a moment. The whisking stilled again, and then resumed more briskly. I saw the tension in her shoulders and neck. “I’m sorry, dear”—still the same cheerful tone—“we had to use that money for other things, since you didn’t need it for a wedding.”
The sound of the front door opening choked off my bitter reply. Mom pushed past me and hurried toward the entryway, calling a greeting to my sister. I followed her into the rush of voices and movement at the door.
It was all I could do not to shove my way forward to grab my baby sister in a hug. The five years that Mom and Dad had refused to speak to me, she’d never disowned me. She’d been the sole family member to defy them and attend my wedding. As the baby of the family, she’d gotten away with it. My brother and Ellie had been too scared to try. But Beth—she’d actually been happy for me. Relieved, even. As if she’d known how unhappy I was with Adam.
“Meg!” she squealed, lurching forward and catching me up in her arms.
I squeezed her tight and closed my eyes. “I missed you!”
“Not as much as I missed you!” She turned her mouth toward my ear to whisper, “I’m so glad you’re here.”
I opened my eyes and looked over her shoulder at another person standing behind her. It was his hair I saw first. That dark, nameless sort of blond that I would have taken great pleasure in calling “dirty dishwater”—except that my real hair color was similar and I hid it with light ash color and golden lowlights. A hot-cold, sick sort of shiver sped through me.
I hated that hair, always cropped and styled so neatly, so rigidly. Countless times, I’d run my fingers through its thick softness only to be told I was messing it up and that there shouldn’t be much touching until we were married. To this day, I’m convinced Adam Harris loved his hair far more than he loved me—which would not have been a problem if he had been engaged to marry his hair instead of me.
And now the hair—and presumably the man beneath it—was standing in the entryway of my parents’ home, its presence stripping away the years. It seemed so natural, so right, so obvious for him to be here as he had been so many times before. The here-and-now was suddenly anachronistic—he’d apparently been the “friend” Beth had brought—and Lewis and Ellie were within the family circle while Adam hovered on the fringe.
I stepped back from my sister. The room grew stiflingly quiet. Adam’s lips scrunched into a tight smile. “Hello, Meg.”
“Hi?” I hadn’t meant for it to sound like a question, but it was all I could manage beyond blinking at him.
My mother pushed past me. “Move out from the middle of the walkway, Meg.” She touched Adam’s arm, drawing him farther into the room. “It’s so wonderful to see you, honey. We would have had you over right when you got home, but Beth said you were sleeping off jet lag. Are you feeling better now?”
“Much better, thanks.” He had the chutzpah to walk right up to Lewis and extend his hand. “Lewis, right? I don’t think we ever formally met. I’m Adam Harris.”
Lewis shook his hand, his face carefully blank. This was a farce, a nightmarish farce.
Was no one going to explain why my ex-fiancé was standing in my parents’ living room? I felt like a cork that had been shoved down a wine bottle’s neck, the only way of escape now too small for me to fit through. The smell of those memories, aging for more than five years, was the worst sort of wine—the sort that swallows the air and makes clear thought impossible.
Lewis walked to me and slipped his arms around my waist. I felt tension in him, but he kissed my ear and whispered, “Do you want to leave?”
I shook my head. There was something important happening and it seemed I ought to understand what it was, but my mind had become a stray dog—matted, trembling, and futilely chasing its tail.
Everyone started talking at once, but none of it made sense. The sound pressed hard around me, saturating the air, filling all my pores, heavier and heavier—
“Someone tell me what he’s doing here!”
My shout cleared the air, silencing the noise. I hadn’t meant to yell. It was all making me crazy.
My sister sidled up to me and took my hand. “He’s not a bad person.” Her voice was soft, pleading, like when we were young and she was trying to talk her way out of having broken the headphones for my Walkman.
“I know.”
“I always liked him. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. I suspected. But—”
“We were on the same team in France.”
“I thought he was in Haiti.”
Adam just watched the two of us, shifting on his feet.
“He was, until after you …”
Broke up with him. “And then?”
“He went to France, and I followed him there.”
She shot him a look of pure admiration, and suddenly I knew exactly what she was going to say next.
“We’re getting married, Meg! You have to be happy for us.”
“I …” I wanted to say the words she needed from me. There was so much hope and trust in her eyes. But a spiny knot twisted in my heart. This was why she’d been so supportive when I’d married Lewis instead of Adam. It hadn’t been about me at all. It had been about her. “Congratulations, sis.” I tried very hard not to spit out the words.
Suddenly the banner made sense. Everyone else already knew, except Lewis and me. It was hard to breathe.
Beth threw her arms around me. “I knew you’d understand. Mom didn’t think you would, but I knew you couldn’t help but be happy for us! I want you to be my matron of honor, okay?”
“When?” I hadn’t meant for it to sound like an assent, but she gave me another happy squeeze.
“Thank you!” She grabbed both my hands. “Mom and Dad have been great about the whole thing. Just wait till you hear! They talked the church board into hiring Adam as associate pastor. And they’re paying for the whole wedding, and our honeymoon, and a down payment on a house! I had no idea we had that much in our savings accounts, did you?”
I met my mother’s eyes and read the heartless truth in them. “Had to use that money for other things,” did they? Like securing the only son-in-law they’d ever really wanted. Like rewarding Beth for being the kind of daughter they approved of. It wasn’t the money itself. If they’d asked me if they could use it to help Beth—and even Adam—I’d have readily agreed.
It was the coldness of it all. The spite and spark of glee in my mother’s eyes. I couldn’t look away. She was relishing it—this moment when she got to stick it to me in front of everyone. I’d embarrassed her horribly when I’d thrown over the seminary graduate for the scientist. And she was going to make sure I got my punishment at every opportunity.
I stumbled down the steps to the front door. My hand grasped the knob.
“Meg!” My mother’s voice froze me. “If you leave now, you will never come back. Do you understand?”
I squeezed the doorknob, leaning my weight against it, my breath coming in heaves. My family or my freedom? Inclusion or self-respect? Why did I even have to choose?
A touch on my arm. I looked up into Lewis’s brown eyes. They were soft, glimmering with concern. He gave me a tiny shake of his head. He knew what it was like to have almost no family. It was why he’d been willing to do anything to help me reconcile with mine. I couldn’t throw that away.
I let go of the doorknob. For him. He put his arm around my waist and led me upstairs. I wouldn’t look at my mother. I didn’t want to see the triumph in her smile.
Reading Group Guide
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This reading group guide for Lucky Baby includes an discussion questions, a Q&A with author Meredith Efken, websites for more information, and a special note from Meredith to book groups. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Discussion Questions
Themes:
1) There are several different mother-figures in this story. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each one and the effect they had on their children. How did each character show a different facet of motherhood? (Hint: Look for a few characters who have mother attributes even if they aren’t actual mothers.)
2) In what ways were each of the four main characters (Meg, Lewis, Wen Ming, and Eva) abandoned by their parents? How did this affect them personally? How do you think this contributed to their struggles in becoming a family? Were there other instances of abandonment in the story? How did these events affect the characters?
3) Each section of the story is prefaced by a quote from Mother Theresa, who dedicated her life to serving orphans in India. Discuss the first two quotes: How does these pertain to that part of the story? How did the characters typify the idea in each quote? What does these quotes mean to you? How do you see the truth of each quote played out in real life?
4) Discuss the final quote: “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” Do you think this is true? If so, how do you think this can be possible? How did Meg and other characters in the story discover or exemplify this idea?
5) Journeys are a recurring theme in the story. What different references to journeys did you notice in the story? What kind of journeys were the characters on? Do you think they reached their destinations? What unexpected turns did they take on the way?
Symbols:
6) The color red signifies luck and happiness in Chinese culture. What role does the color red play in the story? What objects are red? What effect do these objects have on the story? What other images in the story represented luck? Wen Ming placed a great deal of value on the idea of luck. Do you think she was lucky? What symbols of luck and happiness do we have in our culture?
7) What do you think was the meaning of the two crane feathers? What role did they play for the characters? What was the significance of Zhen An finding the feather and giving it to Wen Ming? Was there a connection between the two feathers?
8) In your opinion, who was the chain-smoking Chinese woman with the mole? In Chinese culture, it’s considered unfeminine for women to smoke, and moles are considered serious flaws. In what other ways was the woman flawed? What were her strengths? When Wen Ming says “You don’t even know me,” the woman responds “Not as I wish I did. But still, I love you” what do you think she meant? Do you think she will show up again in the lives of the Lindsay family?
9) How was food and food-related imagery used in the book? What was the significance of food for Wen Ming? For Meg? What were each of them truly hungry for? Do you think they found it?
10) What were some other Chinese-related imagery in the story? What did these images mean to you? Several of them are based on Chinese folklore. If you have time, it might be fun to find more information about some of them and discuss how that information helps you understand the story further, and compare the changes to those symbols that were made for the story with the original folklore images.
Story:
11) Meg draws a distinction between having a child and becoming a mother. Describe the steps she went through to finally feel like she was truly a mother? Do you agree with her on this distinction? Is becoming a mother a process or an event? Why?
12) Discuss Meg’s and Lewis’ relationship. What were its strengths? Its weaknesses? What do you think the effects were of their difference in religious beliefs? What did each of them do to work around that for the sake of their marriage? What do you think of their compromise about taking Eva to church? Do you agree or disagree? Why?
13) Describe Lewis’ conflicted feelings about his mother. How could he be so angry at her and yet desire her approval so strongly? How will he feel about physics now that he knows it is impossible to earn her approval? What do you think will happen to him now that he has moved to China?
14) Some readers have said that Meg’s parents weren’t all that bad, and that Meg didn’t have reason to be upset with them. What do you think? How did Meg and her parents each contribute to the conflict between them? What do you think her relationship with them would be like if the story were continued?
15) Discuss Wen Ming’s relationship with Zhen An (Eva). In what ways was it positive and healing? In what ways was it detrimental to both of them? Do you think it was good for Eva to get rid of Wen Ming’s feather? Was she right to blame Wen Ming for encouraging her to run away? Why or why not? What do you think their relationship will be like going forward?
16) Did Wen Ming really hate America and adoption? Why or why not?
17) How did Zhen An/Eva change throughout the story? Do you think being adopted was overall a positive thing for her or did it hurt more than help? What effect do you think Meg’s motives and expectations for adoption had on Eva’s adjustment to the family? Why do you think Eva’s nightmares and other problems were lessened when she visited China?
18) How were Meg’s expectations about adoption different from what she actually experienced? If you are a parent, how did your expectations about becoming a parent differ from the reality of it? What did you think about her motivation for having a child—good, bad, neutral? What do you think are good reasons to have children—whether by birth or by adoption?
19) What were the positives about Zhen An being adopted? What were some of the negatives? How important do you think one’s culture and heritage is? Eva lost her Chinese culture to a large extent—do you think having a permanent family was a worthwhile trade-off?
20) How did the story change your view of Chinese orphanages or of the situations surrounding abandoned children in that country? What new understanding did you form about China? What new understanding did you form about international adoption?
21) What’s your opinion on the “magical” elements of the story—were they really happening or were they just some sort of vision? Why do you think so? What did they represent in the story? Do you think Meg and Wen Ming will continue experiencing these sort of things in the future? What about Lewis? Will he come around? We only had one scene from Eva’s point of view, so we don’t know if she experiences the same sort of supernatural things. What do you think—does she? What are the differences between what happens to Meg and what Wen Ming experiences? What do you think is the significance of these differences?
22) Discuss Meg’s experience by the hotel pool at the climax of the story. Who was the mother she saw? Who were the children? Were they just random strangers or did they represent something more? What happened to Meg in the water? How did she “grow up” in her way of viewing her parents and others who had hurt her? How did her way of loving them change, and how did that help her overcome the pain?
A Conversation with Meredith Efken
For this Q&A, Meredith turned to good friend and avid reader, Amy Bettis, to find out what questions she had about Lucky Baby. A mom of three and director of children’s ministries at her church, Amy also has personal experience with the world of adoption and foster care, making her the ideal reader to chat with about the story.
What inspired you to write Lucky Baby?
Ever since we adopted our daughter Jessamyn from China, people have asked me, “So when are you going to write a book about it?” The problem was that our adoption experience is so close to my heart, so emotional for me, that I couldn’t easily write about it. I was determined not to even try until I felt that I had a story that could do it justice.
I love the international adoption community—from the agencies, orphanage workers, and foster parents, to the adoptive parents and the children themselves. I care so much about the birth families, too. I wanted to write this book as a sort of loving testament to the adoption experience. When you think about it, international adoption is a totally new phenomenon (new in context of human history)—at least on the scale that it has become. It was unheard of even a century ago. And with it has come so many new kinds of blessings and challenges. It’s taught us much about families and about child development that we simply would not have understood any other way. It’s a historical development as much as it is a personal journey, and I wanted to pay tribute to this experience.
That’s a lot to tackle in one book. Do you feel you accomplished your goals?
Yes and no! In many ways, I tried to take on way more than I could actually handle. I’m so emotionally close to the subject that it’s hard for me to keep a good perspective on it. It was a huge struggle to write the book because I wanted it to be “perfect”—for my daughter, for the other adoptive families, and even for the Chinese people. The truth is, no book will ever be perfect. There are flaws in this book, and I had to get to the point where I could accept that and be satisfied that I’d done the very best that I could do at this point in my career.
I do I feel my story portrays a good snapshot of some of the trials and joys that many adoptive families face. I feel it also gives a respectful and compassionate portrayal of birth parents and of the orphanages that care for our children until we can be united with them.
I also wanted to convey the sense of “magic” and wonder that I felt during the process of adopting, and then bonding, with my daughter. The way to do this in the story eluded me for months, until I came across the idea of using a technique called “magical realism.” Once I made the decision to incorporate this into the story, everything seemed to fall into place, and I am so happy now with how the book turned out.
So what is “magical realism”?
It’s actually a literary technique developed by South American writers several decades ago. Some of the more well-known authors in this genre are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Joanne Harris.
Magical realism incorporates fantastical story elements into an otherwise realistic setting. It’s used to draw attention to different aspects of the human experience—both the physical and the spiritual. In the original South American writers’ works, it had a political and revolutionary aspect as well, which I chose to downplay in my work.
There’s no actual “magic” in magical realism, which is what separates it from fantasy. It just blurs the line between supernatural and natural, so that we can come to a deeper understanding of both worlds. In Lucky Baby, you’ll notice that Meg and Wen Ming never question the supernatural things that happen to them—that’s a feature of magical realism. The supernatural is accepted as being part of the world. The true wonder comes from the truth about the human experience that the characters gain through the story.
As a Christian, this approach excites me because I believe that the separation between the spiritual/supernatural and the physical/realistic is not as wide as we think it is. I think that God is always crossing that line into our world, and we can see it if we are paying attention. Incorporating this technique into Lucky Baby allowed me to explore both worlds and how they interact to affect our lives and our choices.
How much research did it take to write this book? Where did you find most of your information?
I started with my own experience adopting my daughter. I also drew from the experience other adoptive families have had. I did need to do some research even beyond that, however, since my story was set about ten years later than when we adopted. A lot changed in that time, and I needed to have accurate information for the time period I wrote about. But it was easy to talk to other families, get news from our adoption agency, Great Wall China Adoptions, and stay current through email loops and e-zines.
The most challenging part of the story was how to accurately portray the characters living in China, especially in the orphanages. Chinese culture tends to not be as open with information as American culture, so I couldn’t just call up an orphanage director and start asking questions. I used the limited experience I’ve had touring my daughter’s orphanage, the stories of other people who have worked with Chinese orphanages, and I did a lot of digging for personal experiences online.
For other parts of daily life in China, I read blogs, watched personal videos on You-Tube, and talked with some of my Chinese friends. As an American, I can’t capture the Chinese experience as authentically as someone who has been immersed in that culture could, but I hope I came close. It was important to me to give a respectful and appreciative portrayal of the Chinese people, out of love for my daughter and her heritage.
So how much of this story was autobiographical?
Not a whole lot, actually. The most autobiographical part was the scene where Meg receives Eva. My husband was with me, whereas Meg’s was not, but we were in a government building and the way Meg felt as she waited for her child and the way the receiving took place was pretty much the way it happened for us. Our daughter was much younger than Eva, but she did start screaming when we took her. The scene following that, with Auntie Yang in the private room was totally fictional.
Some of Meg’s despair about not being a good enough mother is similar to how I’ve felt over some of my own failures as a mom. The exact circumstances are fictional, but the emotions are the same.
I wasn’t willing to make the story very autobiographical because that story belongs to my daughter, and I don’t have the right to take it for my novel.
Can you separate some of the other details into fact and fiction?
Sure! I think it’s safe to say that the details on the actual adoption process are accurate. I skimmed over most of the paper chase because it’s so tedious, there’s not much I can do to make it exciting for a book.
I think that the depiction of Wen Ming’s orphanage is fairly true-to-life as well, though the orphanage itself is fictional. All orphanages are not the same—there are good ones and not-so-good ones. Wen Ming and Zhen An lived in a really good orphanage, and in some ways I made it similar to the one my daughter came from. The workers are kind and dedicated, the building is clean, and the children are as well cared for as they can be in an institutional setting.
I mentioned two real-life organizations in the book—our adoption agency, Great Wall, and Half The Sky Foundation. Great Wall, like so many terrific adoption agencies, do as much as they can to find families for orphaned children, especially those with special needs. Half The Sky Foundation is devoted to helping the orphans in China that aren’t adopted, through building schools and providing medical care and other important projects. You can find out more about both organizations at their websites, which I included in the Resources section.
Several of the shops in Guangzhou that I mentioned are, or were, real shops. I’ve heard that Shop on the Stairs closed a couple of years ago, which saddens me.
The tango restaurant Meg and Lewis frequent, as well as the tea shop, are both fictional. So is Meg’s church and the Bible college she attended. Her symphony, and it’s unusual focus, are fictional, but inspired by a real symphony in a different city.
Lewis’ university—University of Chicago—is real, and so is Fermi Lab and CERN, but his mother is not and neither are her contributions to the physics world. The search for the Higg’s boson is very real, but that breakthrough hasn’t happened at the time of writing this Q&A. The way I portrayed that breakthrough is based on the conjecture of some of my physics friends, so we’ll have to see how that plays out in the future.
The supernatural elements in the story are whatever you make them out to be. Real or fictional? You choose.
How do you develop the characters in your books?
I think every author develops characters based on their own experiences and a combination of different people and types of people they know. I usually have a general mental picture of the type of person I need for a certain character—rather like a director getting ready to conduct auditions for a play. I use my experiences with different people and my own understanding of human behavior to help me shape each character. I borrow aspects of personalities or individual quirks and put them together to create a unique, fictional character that is based in human reality.
Do you base your characters on real life people?
There’s a t-shirt I want that says “Be careful, or I’ll put you in my novel!” I used to tease my friend’s dates that if they hurt my friend, they’d end up my next villain. Here’s the secret: I’m just bluffing.
In reality, it’s very rare for me to base a character entirely on one real person. It’s too difficult because fictional people have to be shaped to an extent to fit the parameters of the story. Since real people are more complex and their lives rarely follow the structure of a novel, it’s more useful for me to create entirely fictional people.
The other issue is a respect for privacy and compassion for the people I know. In a novel, it’s necessary for characters to behave badly and make poor choices at times. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone or damage their reputations by basing a character on them and then having that character act wrongly. If I ever did base a character on someone I know, it would only be the most positive and noble aspects of that person that I would use. All the “bad stuff” would be strictly fictional.
I did use one of my daughter’s teachers in the book—at least his name. But it was a very minor character and I did it to amuse her and the teacher. You were amused, right, Mr. Compton?
Why did you choose to make the relationships between Meg and her mom and Lewis and his mom so tense?
It was a thematic decision. One of the things I wanted to explore in the book was that there is more than one way to be abandoned. The Chinese orphans were abandoned in a traditional sense. But in an indirect way, so were Meg and Lewis. I wanted to explore the effect that might have on them as they try to all come together to form a family when none of them had a good model to follow. Given the number of broken and dysfunctional families for those in my generation and younger, I think it’s an important question to explore. And since Meg was my main character, and this story is also about her journey to become a mother, it made sense to focus on the mothers in the story as a way to tie the themes together.
Is it usual for adopted children to have the sort of attachment problems that Eva had? Doesn’t that make adoption a bit more scary?
That’s a delicate question. Parenting itself is scary—regardless of how the family is formed! There are no guarantees that any child is going to sail through life without problems. But there are some challenges adoptive families face that most non-adoptive families don’t have to deal with.
First of all, I want people to understand that when an author sits down to plot out a book, she fully intends to make life for her characters as difficult as possible. A novel without conflicts, without challenges for the characters to overcome, is boring.
So you can’t judge the adoption experience on the basis of a novel—fiction requires conflict to levels that real life does not. The same can actually be said of most news stories about adoption. Bad news sells. Good news doesn’t. That means you will hear far more stories of difficult adoptions or problems than you will about all the many, many adoptions that are virtually trouble-free. Unfair, but that’s how life is.
On the other hand, there is an aphorism in the adoption community that every institutionalized child is a “special needs” child. This includes those in foster care and those in even the best orphanages. At the very least, every adopted child has to heal from the wound of being separated from their birth mother. This affects each child in a different way, but adoptive parents have to understand and be equipped to deal with that very deep loss and the grief it often brings.
We’ve only learned about attachment disorders in the last twenty years or so. There’s a lot we don’t understand, but we’ve made tremendous progress. Not every adopted child has attachment problems, and it’s not entirely clear why some do and some don’t. Even non-adopted children occasionally have attachment disorders. But it’s not the end of the world—there are a growing number of techniques and therapies that have successfully helped children heal and learn to bond with their families. There is always hope and healing.
I used to conduct adoption information seminars as part of my job as a regional office for Great Wall. My advice to prospective parents was to educate themselves about attachment disorders and to be prepared to love their child and be committed to them no matter what difficulties arose. I also encouraged them that the majority of children adjust to their new families with few or no problems at all.
At the end of the book the relationships are still quite fragile in their healing process. If you were to lengthen the book, how would you help the characters develop strong and deep relationships?
I think counseling is always a good place to start, especially when the problems are caused by trauma that happened to children before they were old enough to process or understand.
I also would love to have explored Lewis’ faith journey in more depth. I firmly believe that God heals not just our bodies but also our emotional wounds, and I think that if Lewis could come to even a point of acceptance about God’s existence, he would find the path to healing much easier.
For the family as a whole, I would focus on them consciously and deliberately defining for themselves what a family is, and what their family is going to look like. I think they’d need to be very protective of their family space and time together. The girls would need direct instruction about how to be part of a family, and they’d need lots of reassurance that they are loved by their family no matter how badly they behave or how angry they might feel. Lots of communication, lots of forgiveness, lots of patience—these are what I would “prescribe” for them. And I’d also want them to take it in baby steps and not expect everything to be perfect overnight. It’s a process, and it might take years, but in my mind, they do make it.
Resources
Great Wall China Adoptions: http://www.gwca.org
Half The Sky Foundation: http://www.halfthesky.org/
Shaohannah’s Hope: http://www.showhope.org/
Rainbow Kids.com: http://www.rainbowkids.com/
Author Note:
I’m a big fan of book clubs, and I’d love to chat with your group either in person, by speaker phone, or online chat. If you go to my website: http://www.meredithefken.com, you can find a downloadable book club kit that includes the information here plus additional discussion questions, ideas for creating a Chinese theme for your book club meeting, recipe for Chinese dumplings, and a fun Chinese calligraphy project for your group members. Information is there on how to contact me to speak to your group.
You can also email me at Meredith@meredithefken.com. Or follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/meredithefken and friend me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/meredithefken.
Discussion Questions
Themes:
1) There are several different mother-figures in this story. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each one and the effect they had on their children. How did each character show a different facet of motherhood? (Hint: Look for a few characters who have mother attributes even if they aren’t actual mothers.)
2) In what ways were each of the four main characters (Meg, Lewis, Wen Ming, and Eva) abandoned by their parents? How did this affect them personally? How do you think this contributed to their struggles in becoming a family? Were there other instances of abandonment in the story? How did these events affect the characters?
3) Each section of the story is prefaced by a quote from Mother Theresa, who dedicated her life to serving orphans in India. Discuss the first two quotes: How does these pertain to that part of the story? How did the characters typify the idea in each quote? What does these quotes mean to you? How do you see the truth of each quote played out in real life?
4) Discuss the final quote: “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” Do you think this is true? If so, how do you think this can be possible? How did Meg and other characters in the story discover or exemplify this idea?
5) Journeys are a recurring theme in the story. What different references to journeys did you notice in the story? What kind of journeys were the characters on? Do you think they reached their destinations? What unexpected turns did they take on the way?
Symbols:
6) The color red signifies luck and happiness in Chinese culture. What role does the color red play in the story? What objects are red? What effect do these objects have on the story? What other images in the story represented luck? Wen Ming placed a great deal of value on the idea of luck. Do you think she was lucky? What symbols of luck and happiness do we have in our culture?
7) What do you think was the meaning of the two crane feathers? What role did they play for the characters? What was the significance of Zhen An finding the feather and giving it to Wen Ming? Was there a connection between the two feathers?
8) In your opinion, who was the chain-smoking Chinese woman with the mole? In Chinese culture, it’s considered unfeminine for women to smoke, and moles are considered serious flaws. In what other ways was the woman flawed? What were her strengths? When Wen Ming says “You don’t even know me,” the woman responds “Not as I wish I did. But still, I love you” what do you think she meant? Do you think she will show up again in the lives of the Lindsay family?
9) How was food and food-related imagery used in the book? What was the significance of food for Wen Ming? For Meg? What were each of them truly hungry for? Do you think they found it?
10) What were some other Chinese-related imagery in the story? What did these images mean to you? Several of them are based on Chinese folklore. If you have time, it might be fun to find more information about some of them and discuss how that information helps you understand the story further, and compare the changes to those symbols that were made for the story with the original folklore images.
Story:
11) Meg draws a distinction between having a child and becoming a mother. Describe the steps she went through to finally feel like she was truly a mother? Do you agree with her on this distinction? Is becoming a mother a process or an event? Why?
12) Discuss Meg’s and Lewis’ relationship. What were its strengths? Its weaknesses? What do you think the effects were of their difference in religious beliefs? What did each of them do to work around that for the sake of their marriage? What do you think of their compromise about taking Eva to church? Do you agree or disagree? Why?
13) Describe Lewis’ conflicted feelings about his mother. How could he be so angry at her and yet desire her approval so strongly? How will he feel about physics now that he knows it is impossible to earn her approval? What do you think will happen to him now that he has moved to China?
14) Some readers have said that Meg’s parents weren’t all that bad, and that Meg didn’t have reason to be upset with them. What do you think? How did Meg and her parents each contribute to the conflict between them? What do you think her relationship with them would be like if the story were continued?
15) Discuss Wen Ming’s relationship with Zhen An (Eva). In what ways was it positive and healing? In what ways was it detrimental to both of them? Do you think it was good for Eva to get rid of Wen Ming’s feather? Was she right to blame Wen Ming for encouraging her to run away? Why or why not? What do you think their relationship will be like going forward?
16) Did Wen Ming really hate America and adoption? Why or why not?
17) How did Zhen An/Eva change throughout the story? Do you think being adopted was overall a positive thing for her or did it hurt more than help? What effect do you think Meg’s motives and expectations for adoption had on Eva’s adjustment to the family? Why do you think Eva’s nightmares and other problems were lessened when she visited China?
18) How were Meg’s expectations about adoption different from what she actually experienced? If you are a parent, how did your expectations about becoming a parent differ from the reality of it? What did you think about her motivation for having a child—good, bad, neutral? What do you think are good reasons to have children—whether by birth or by adoption?
19) What were the positives about Zhen An being adopted? What were some of the negatives? How important do you think one’s culture and heritage is? Eva lost her Chinese culture to a large extent—do you think having a permanent family was a worthwhile trade-off?
20) How did the story change your view of Chinese orphanages or of the situations surrounding abandoned children in that country? What new understanding did you form about China? What new understanding did you form about international adoption?
21) What’s your opinion on the “magical” elements of the story—were they really happening or were they just some sort of vision? Why do you think so? What did they represent in the story? Do you think Meg and Wen Ming will continue experiencing these sort of things in the future? What about Lewis? Will he come around? We only had one scene from Eva’s point of view, so we don’t know if she experiences the same sort of supernatural things. What do you think—does she? What are the differences between what happens to Meg and what Wen Ming experiences? What do you think is the significance of these differences?
22) Discuss Meg’s experience by the hotel pool at the climax of the story. Who was the mother she saw? Who were the children? Were they just random strangers or did they represent something more? What happened to Meg in the water? How did she “grow up” in her way of viewing her parents and others who had hurt her? How did her way of loving them change, and how did that help her overcome the pain?
A Conversation with Meredith Efken
For this Q&A, Meredith turned to good friend and avid reader, Amy Bettis, to find out what questions she had about Lucky Baby. A mom of three and director of children’s ministries at her church, Amy also has personal experience with the world of adoption and foster care, making her the ideal reader to chat with about the story.
What inspired you to write Lucky Baby?
Ever since we adopted our daughter Jessamyn from China, people have asked me, “So when are you going to write a book about it?” The problem was that our adoption experience is so close to my heart, so emotional for me, that I couldn’t easily write about it. I was determined not to even try until I felt that I had a story that could do it justice.
I love the international adoption community—from the agencies, orphanage workers, and foster parents, to the adoptive parents and the children themselves. I care so much about the birth families, too. I wanted to write this book as a sort of loving testament to the adoption experience. When you think about it, international adoption is a totally new phenomenon (new in context of human history)—at least on the scale that it has become. It was unheard of even a century ago. And with it has come so many new kinds of blessings and challenges. It’s taught us much about families and about child development that we simply would not have understood any other way. It’s a historical development as much as it is a personal journey, and I wanted to pay tribute to this experience.
That’s a lot to tackle in one book. Do you feel you accomplished your goals?
Yes and no! In many ways, I tried to take on way more than I could actually handle. I’m so emotionally close to the subject that it’s hard for me to keep a good perspective on it. It was a huge struggle to write the book because I wanted it to be “perfect”—for my daughter, for the other adoptive families, and even for the Chinese people. The truth is, no book will ever be perfect. There are flaws in this book, and I had to get to the point where I could accept that and be satisfied that I’d done the very best that I could do at this point in my career.
I do I feel my story portrays a good snapshot of some of the trials and joys that many adoptive families face. I feel it also gives a respectful and compassionate portrayal of birth parents and of the orphanages that care for our children until we can be united with them.
I also wanted to convey the sense of “magic” and wonder that I felt during the process of adopting, and then bonding, with my daughter. The way to do this in the story eluded me for months, until I came across the idea of using a technique called “magical realism.” Once I made the decision to incorporate this into the story, everything seemed to fall into place, and I am so happy now with how the book turned out.
So what is “magical realism”?
It’s actually a literary technique developed by South American writers several decades ago. Some of the more well-known authors in this genre are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Joanne Harris.
Magical realism incorporates fantastical story elements into an otherwise realistic setting. It’s used to draw attention to different aspects of the human experience—both the physical and the spiritual. In the original South American writers’ works, it had a political and revolutionary aspect as well, which I chose to downplay in my work.
There’s no actual “magic” in magical realism, which is what separates it from fantasy. It just blurs the line between supernatural and natural, so that we can come to a deeper understanding of both worlds. In Lucky Baby, you’ll notice that Meg and Wen Ming never question the supernatural things that happen to them—that’s a feature of magical realism. The supernatural is accepted as being part of the world. The true wonder comes from the truth about the human experience that the characters gain through the story.
As a Christian, this approach excites me because I believe that the separation between the spiritual/supernatural and the physical/realistic is not as wide as we think it is. I think that God is always crossing that line into our world, and we can see it if we are paying attention. Incorporating this technique into Lucky Baby allowed me to explore both worlds and how they interact to affect our lives and our choices.
How much research did it take to write this book? Where did you find most of your information?
I started with my own experience adopting my daughter. I also drew from the experience other adoptive families have had. I did need to do some research even beyond that, however, since my story was set about ten years later than when we adopted. A lot changed in that time, and I needed to have accurate information for the time period I wrote about. But it was easy to talk to other families, get news from our adoption agency, Great Wall China Adoptions, and stay current through email loops and e-zines.
The most challenging part of the story was how to accurately portray the characters living in China, especially in the orphanages. Chinese culture tends to not be as open with information as American culture, so I couldn’t just call up an orphanage director and start asking questions. I used the limited experience I’ve had touring my daughter’s orphanage, the stories of other people who have worked with Chinese orphanages, and I did a lot of digging for personal experiences online.
For other parts of daily life in China, I read blogs, watched personal videos on You-Tube, and talked with some of my Chinese friends. As an American, I can’t capture the Chinese experience as authentically as someone who has been immersed in that culture could, but I hope I came close. It was important to me to give a respectful and appreciative portrayal of the Chinese people, out of love for my daughter and her heritage.
So how much of this story was autobiographical?
Not a whole lot, actually. The most autobiographical part was the scene where Meg receives Eva. My husband was with me, whereas Meg’s was not, but we were in a government building and the way Meg felt as she waited for her child and the way the receiving took place was pretty much the way it happened for us. Our daughter was much younger than Eva, but she did start screaming when we took her. The scene following that, with Auntie Yang in the private room was totally fictional.
Some of Meg’s despair about not being a good enough mother is similar to how I’ve felt over some of my own failures as a mom. The exact circumstances are fictional, but the emotions are the same.
I wasn’t willing to make the story very autobiographical because that story belongs to my daughter, and I don’t have the right to take it for my novel.
Can you separate some of the other details into fact and fiction?
Sure! I think it’s safe to say that the details on the actual adoption process are accurate. I skimmed over most of the paper chase because it’s so tedious, there’s not much I can do to make it exciting for a book.
I think that the depiction of Wen Ming’s orphanage is fairly true-to-life as well, though the orphanage itself is fictional. All orphanages are not the same—there are good ones and not-so-good ones. Wen Ming and Zhen An lived in a really good orphanage, and in some ways I made it similar to the one my daughter came from. The workers are kind and dedicated, the building is clean, and the children are as well cared for as they can be in an institutional setting.
I mentioned two real-life organizations in the book—our adoption agency, Great Wall, and Half The Sky Foundation. Great Wall, like so many terrific adoption agencies, do as much as they can to find families for orphaned children, especially those with special needs. Half The Sky Foundation is devoted to helping the orphans in China that aren’t adopted, through building schools and providing medical care and other important projects. You can find out more about both organizations at their websites, which I included in the Resources section.
Several of the shops in Guangzhou that I mentioned are, or were, real shops. I’ve heard that Shop on the Stairs closed a couple of years ago, which saddens me.
The tango restaurant Meg and Lewis frequent, as well as the tea shop, are both fictional. So is Meg’s church and the Bible college she attended. Her symphony, and it’s unusual focus, are fictional, but inspired by a real symphony in a different city.
Lewis’ university—University of Chicago—is real, and so is Fermi Lab and CERN, but his mother is not and neither are her contributions to the physics world. The search for the Higg’s boson is very real, but that breakthrough hasn’t happened at the time of writing this Q&A. The way I portrayed that breakthrough is based on the conjecture of some of my physics friends, so we’ll have to see how that plays out in the future.
The supernatural elements in the story are whatever you make them out to be. Real or fictional? You choose.
How do you develop the characters in your books?
I think every author develops characters based on their own experiences and a combination of different people and types of people they know. I usually have a general mental picture of the type of person I need for a certain character—rather like a director getting ready to conduct auditions for a play. I use my experiences with different people and my own understanding of human behavior to help me shape each character. I borrow aspects of personalities or individual quirks and put them together to create a unique, fictional character that is based in human reality.
Do you base your characters on real life people?
There’s a t-shirt I want that says “Be careful, or I’ll put you in my novel!” I used to tease my friend’s dates that if they hurt my friend, they’d end up my next villain. Here’s the secret: I’m just bluffing.
In reality, it’s very rare for me to base a character entirely on one real person. It’s too difficult because fictional people have to be shaped to an extent to fit the parameters of the story. Since real people are more complex and their lives rarely follow the structure of a novel, it’s more useful for me to create entirely fictional people.
The other issue is a respect for privacy and compassion for the people I know. In a novel, it’s necessary for characters to behave badly and make poor choices at times. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone or damage their reputations by basing a character on them and then having that character act wrongly. If I ever did base a character on someone I know, it would only be the most positive and noble aspects of that person that I would use. All the “bad stuff” would be strictly fictional.
I did use one of my daughter’s teachers in the book—at least his name. But it was a very minor character and I did it to amuse her and the teacher. You were amused, right, Mr. Compton?
Why did you choose to make the relationships between Meg and her mom and Lewis and his mom so tense?
It was a thematic decision. One of the things I wanted to explore in the book was that there is more than one way to be abandoned. The Chinese orphans were abandoned in a traditional sense. But in an indirect way, so were Meg and Lewis. I wanted to explore the effect that might have on them as they try to all come together to form a family when none of them had a good model to follow. Given the number of broken and dysfunctional families for those in my generation and younger, I think it’s an important question to explore. And since Meg was my main character, and this story is also about her journey to become a mother, it made sense to focus on the mothers in the story as a way to tie the themes together.
Is it usual for adopted children to have the sort of attachment problems that Eva had? Doesn’t that make adoption a bit more scary?
That’s a delicate question. Parenting itself is scary—regardless of how the family is formed! There are no guarantees that any child is going to sail through life without problems. But there are some challenges adoptive families face that most non-adoptive families don’t have to deal with.
First of all, I want people to understand that when an author sits down to plot out a book, she fully intends to make life for her characters as difficult as possible. A novel without conflicts, without challenges for the characters to overcome, is boring.
So you can’t judge the adoption experience on the basis of a novel—fiction requires conflict to levels that real life does not. The same can actually be said of most news stories about adoption. Bad news sells. Good news doesn’t. That means you will hear far more stories of difficult adoptions or problems than you will about all the many, many adoptions that are virtually trouble-free. Unfair, but that’s how life is.
On the other hand, there is an aphorism in the adoption community that every institutionalized child is a “special needs” child. This includes those in foster care and those in even the best orphanages. At the very least, every adopted child has to heal from the wound of being separated from their birth mother. This affects each child in a different way, but adoptive parents have to understand and be equipped to deal with that very deep loss and the grief it often brings.
We’ve only learned about attachment disorders in the last twenty years or so. There’s a lot we don’t understand, but we’ve made tremendous progress. Not every adopted child has attachment problems, and it’s not entirely clear why some do and some don’t. Even non-adopted children occasionally have attachment disorders. But it’s not the end of the world—there are a growing number of techniques and therapies that have successfully helped children heal and learn to bond with their families. There is always hope and healing.
I used to conduct adoption information seminars as part of my job as a regional office for Great Wall. My advice to prospective parents was to educate themselves about attachment disorders and to be prepared to love their child and be committed to them no matter what difficulties arose. I also encouraged them that the majority of children adjust to their new families with few or no problems at all.
At the end of the book the relationships are still quite fragile in their healing process. If you were to lengthen the book, how would you help the characters develop strong and deep relationships?
I think counseling is always a good place to start, especially when the problems are caused by trauma that happened to children before they were old enough to process or understand.
I also would love to have explored Lewis’ faith journey in more depth. I firmly believe that God heals not just our bodies but also our emotional wounds, and I think that if Lewis could come to even a point of acceptance about God’s existence, he would find the path to healing much easier.
For the family as a whole, I would focus on them consciously and deliberately defining for themselves what a family is, and what their family is going to look like. I think they’d need to be very protective of their family space and time together. The girls would need direct instruction about how to be part of a family, and they’d need lots of reassurance that they are loved by their family no matter how badly they behave or how angry they might feel. Lots of communication, lots of forgiveness, lots of patience—these are what I would “prescribe” for them. And I’d also want them to take it in baby steps and not expect everything to be perfect overnight. It’s a process, and it might take years, but in my mind, they do make it.
Resources
Great Wall China Adoptions: http://www.gwca.org
Half The Sky Foundation: http://www.halfthesky.org/
Shaohannah’s Hope: http://www.showhope.org/
Rainbow Kids.com: http://www.rainbowkids.com/
Author Note:
I’m a big fan of book clubs, and I’d love to chat with your group either in person, by speaker phone, or online chat. If you go to my website: http://www.meredithefken.com, you can find a downloadable book club kit that includes the information here plus additional discussion questions, ideas for creating a Chinese theme for your book club meeting, recipe for Chinese dumplings, and a fun Chinese calligraphy project for your group members. Information is there on how to contact me to speak to your group.
You can also email me at Meredith@meredithefken.com. Or follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/meredithefken and friend me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/meredithefken.
About The Author
Photograph © Cherie Phelps
Meredith has written three previous novels, SAHM I Am, Play it Again SAHM, and @Home for the Holidays. A stay-at-home mom with jobs including homeschooling her two daughters, writing, speaking, and freelance editing, Meredith has a background in adult education and has given workshops on writing, adoption, and church leadership topics. She is a member of several Chinese adoption communities, both online and in person, and speaks to women's groups like MOPS. She is a graduate of the Vineyard Leadership Institute. She is active at her church and enjoys spending time with her husband and two daughters, the oldest being adopted from China.
Product Details
- Publisher: Howard Books (April 13, 2010)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781416595502
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Lucky Baby Trade Paperback 9781416595502
- Author Photo (jpg): Meredith Efken Photograph © Cherie Phelps(1.6 MB)
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