The FCC-IN Book Club meets every other month to discuss books with subjects related to adoption and Chinese culture.  Visit the Event page to see dates and details. Book summaries can be found below.

Shanghai Girls: A Novel by Lisa See

For readers of the phenomenal bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love--a stunning new novel from Lisa See about two sisters who leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles.

May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides.

But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)--where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months--they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.

A novel about two sisters, two cultures, and the struggle to find a new life in America while bound to the old, Shanghai Girls is a fresh, fascinating adventure from beloved and bestselling author Lisa See.  - Amazon.com

Lucky Girl: A Memoir by Mei-Ling Hopgood

With concise, truth-seeking deftness of a seasoned journalist, Mei-Ling delves into the political, cultural and financial reasoning behind her Chinese birth parents' decision to put her up for adoption. . . Cut with historical detail and touching accounts of Mei-Ling's "real" family, the Hopgoods, Lucky Girl is a refreshingly upbeat take on dealing with the pressures and expectations of family, while remaining true to oneself. Simple, to the point and uncluttered of the everyday minutiae, Mei-Ling Hopgood nails the concept of becoming one's own.”—Detroit Metro Times

From Home to Homeland: What Adoptive Families Need to Know Before Making a Return Trip to China by Debra Jacobs, Iris Chin Ponte and Leslie Kim Wang

Every year, hundreds of adoptive families embark on homeland trips to China and other countries. Homeland trips offer great opportunities for helping adopted children develop a coherent narrative that makes sense of their complicated beginnings. Although the trip can be a joyful experience, it can also raise many challenges. The chapters of this book by Joyce Maguire Pavao, Jane Brown, Jane Leidtke, Rose Lewis, and many others offer the engaging perspectives of adoptive parents, professionals, researchers, and, most importantly, adopted children themselves. Together, they comprise a unique, invaluable resource that will help families prepare for a homeland trip, make decisions about how to travel, anticipate what they might experience in China, and meaningfully integrate events and emotions after arriving back home. From Home to Homeland is for all internationally adoptive families considering a homeland trip or figuring out how to best make sense of a trip after returning home. - Amazon.com

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang

Chang, a former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, explores the urban realities and rural roots of a community, until now, as unacknowledged as it is massive—China's 130 million workers whose exodus from villages to factory and city life is the largest migration in history. Chang spent three years following the successes, hardships and heartbreaks of two teenage girls, Min and Chunming, migrants working the assembly lines in Dongguan, one of the new factory cities that have sprung up all over China. The author's incorporation of their diaries, e-mails and text messages into the narrative allows the girls—with their incredible ambition and youth—to emerge powerfully upon the page. Dongguan city is itself a character, with talent markets where migrants talk their way into their next big break, a lively if not always romantic online dating community and a computerized English language school where students shave their heads like monks to show commitment to their studies. A first generation Chinese-American, Chang uses details of her own family's immigration to provide a vivid personal framework for her contemporary observations. A gifted storyteller, Chang plumbs these private narratives to craft a work of universal relevance. - Amazon.com

In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories by Rita Simon and Rhonda Roorda

In Their Own Voices sheds light on a very complex and controversial debate. The debate would be richer and wiser if those who seek to defend or condemn transracial adoption read this book first. It should be required reading for anyone who is thinking of adopting or has adopted a child from another race. -- Barbara Davidson, civil rights advocate and adoptive mother