英语书籍:Lucky Girl(节选一)

本帖于 2010-05-03 05:39:23 时间, 由版主 林贝卡 编辑

英语书籍:Lucky Girl(节选一)ZT


=====Lucky Girl简介=====================

Mei-Ling Hopgood was an all-American girl. She grew up in
the midwest, was a high school pom-pom girl, studied
journalism at the University of Missouri, and became a
reporter for a Michigan newspaper. She wasn't really
curious about her Asian roots, though she knew she was
adopted. Then one day, when she was in her twenties, her
birth family from Taiwan came calling--on the phone,
on the computer, by fax--in a language she didn't
understand. The Wangs wanted to meet her; they wanted her
to return home.

As her sisters and parents pulled her into their lives,
claiming her as one of their own, Mei-Ling fell in love
with them. But this unexpected reunion has a price. She
uncovers the devastating secrets that haunt them to this
day as she attempts to understand the hard choices of her
birth mother.

"Lucky Girl" journeys into Chinese culture--its
magnificent sights, war-torn history, and sumptuous
foods--while revealing the personal suffering wrought by
the country's tightly held traditions. Mei-Ling finds that
although both the Hopgoods and the Wangs have shaped her
identity, it's up to her to figure out who she is. Hers
is a tale of love and loss, frustration, hilarity, deep
sadness, and great discovery that helps her understand the
meaning of family.




=====Lucky Girl=====================

LUCKY GIRL
by Mei-Ling Hopgood (nonfiction)
Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
ISBN: 9781565126008
Copyright (c) 2009 by Mei-Ling Hopgood
LUCKY (Part 1 of 5)
======================================

PROLOGUE

'Taoyuan, Taiwan, March 29, 1997'

The luggage was coming fast. Too fast.

I stood in the baggage claim of Chiang-kai Shek International
Airport, silently watching the overstuffed Samsonite suitcases, the
giant cardboard boxes tied shut with red string, and the chewed-up
duffel bags speed by on the conveyor belt. I was dizzy from the buzz
of Mandarin--a language I could not understand--and anxious from
wondering who might be waiting behind the exit door.

I was about to meet the Chinese family that gave me up for adoption
days after I was born, twenty-three years earlier. During the past
two months since we made first contact, I had lingered in a state of
hazy, almost unnatural calm over the sudden appearance of my long-
lost parents and sisters. But as I stood in the Taipei airport, I
realized this reunion was real, not a dream, not just some story I
might write for the newspaper I worked for. This was actually
happening. To me.

Nervous and sweating, I pulled my bags off of the belt and adjusted
my brown polyester shirt and skirt, an outfit I chose for its
simplicity and wrinkle resistance. The rest of me looked horrible.
What a grand first impression I would make: wild hair and bleary
eyes, smelling of airplane funk and the smokers who puffed away
during the Japan-Taiwan leg of the eighteen-hour journey. I thought
my heart was going to jump out of my throat.

A perky airline employee directed me through customs and to exit 4.
The doors slid open to reveal a room filled with people. They were
pushing, hanging, and standing on a wood rail, waving signs in
Chinese characters. They jumped up and down, wailed and shouted. I
had seen my relatives in pictures, but as I scanned the Chinese
faces, all of them seemed to look alike, with eyes as dark as mine.

'My God. How will I know them?'

Then I saw the sign, handwritten in thick, black, slanted letters:
MEI-LING. A crowd of strangers rushed toward me.


CHAPTER ONE
'COME BACK TAIWAN'

'Royal Oak, Michigan, May 1995'

I had recently moved back to metro Detroit after graduating from
college, and was working as a rookie reporter for the "Detroit Free
Press," writing about such cheery topics as violent teens who stalk
police officers and mothers who go mad and stab their children. I
rented a place on the second floor of a rickety old house smeared
with a thin coat of mustard yellow paint on South Washington Avenue
in the suburb of Royal Oak. I was twenty-one years old and single,
so a trendy neighborhood and the abundance of nearby bars always
made up for a crappy apartment. I loved my starter life, and for the
first time I was feeling confident in my own skin. I believed I had
conquered the insecurities over being Asian that had vexed me for so
long. I thought I finally was getting a grip on who I wanted to be.

Then one afternoon, my mom called. She and Dad still lived in my
hometown of Taylor, a forty-minute drive south, and now that I was
back in the area we were able to chat and visit much more often.
Usually we just traded mother-daughter banter on the temperamental
Michigan weather, work, my brothers, my current boyfriend, and so
forth, but on this day, Mom had some more interesting news to share.

"Sister Maureen called us today," she said. "She's in town and she
wants to see you."

Sister Maureen Sinnott had been a distant, almost mythical figure
that my parents talked about with reverence. Shortly after they
married, my parents had contacted Maureen, hoping she could help
them adopt a child. The nun gladly acted as the link between my
birth family and my adoptive parents, maneuvering me through the
maddening Taiwan and U.S. bureaucracies and caring for me for the
almost eight months it took to get me out of the country. Maureen
and I had exchanged letters occasionally when I was a girl, but I
couldn't remember much about her.

Mom said that after many years living in other states and abroad,
Maureen had returned to her native Allen Park, a Detroit suburb that
borders Taylor's northeast side.

"You should call her," Mom said.

The seven or so months I had spent in Taiwan as a baby never
interested me much. My birth parents were shadows, known to me only
in the folds of my eyelids, the curve of my chin, or the shiny dark
of my hair. They were merely characters in some childhood fairy
tale, ghosts of a former lifetime, memories that only existed
because I was told they existed. The details had little to do with
my happy life as an American girl who grew up with blue-eyed parents
and two Korean brothers, who were also adopted. I was just another
one of the endless unwanted baby girls born to and discarded by poor
Chinese families. The past was the past.

=====作者Mei-Ling Hopgood 简介=====================

Mei-Ling Hopgood is an award-winning journalist who has written for
the "Detroit Free Press," the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch," "National
Geographic Traveler," and the "Miami Herald" and has worked in the
"Cox Newspapers" Washington bureau. She lives in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, with her hu*****and and daughter.



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