Wuhu meets LuLu as adopted child visits birthplace

Associated Press Writer

For some, the benefits of adopting a child are great, but so are the mysteries and unsettled feeling that can haunt adoptive parents and their children throughout their lives.

Emily Prager tried to avoid those uncertainties when in 1999 she took her adopted 4-year-old daughter LuLu back to China to learn about her heritage. In "Wuhu Diary," Prager details her travels with LuLu as they explore LuLu's origins and try to deal with their different cultures.

Prager's book, her fifth and most personal, is written in a conversational, diary style. The reader learns not only where the two traveled, but what they ate, what they bought and what the weather was. The result is an easy-to-read but somewhat shallow book that is hard to characterize. It is almost a travelogue, and almost -- but not deep enough to be -- a memoir.

Prager has good reasons for taking LuLu to China at an early age. She hopes the orphanage still has some information about LuLu's parents. But Prager also wants LuLu to see China through innocent eyes.

"At four, LuLu judges things purely. I wanted her to be a child in China, small enough to breathe it in without prejudice or consciousness," Prager writes, adding that she would have made the trip even if LuLu were her own Caucasian birth child.

The journey is not without pitfalls, the most significant being the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, a week after their arrival. Prager feared anti-American outbursts in Wuhu, but her trip was largely unaffected by the bombing backlash. However, Prager believes the incident did affect the government's decision to deny her petition to see the orphanage where LuLu lived.

Still, the trip is mostly successful, according to Prager. LuLu bonded with the people she met, mostly the hotel staff, and enjoyed touring Wuhu. LuLu is a bright, precocious child with an outgoing personality, and she touched the lives of many of the Chinese she met, causing some to have second thoughts about their anti-adoption feelings.

Many adoptive parents -- and especially those whose children have ethnic or racial backgrounds different from theirs -- try to deal with the pressures through support groups, ethnic clubs or classes. Many of those people would probably cringe at the idea of taking a 4-year-old to China and confronting her with the fact that her "first parents" abandoned her at the entrance to a crowded bridge near a police station.

But it seems to have worked for LuLu, who, Prager reports, returned to the United States "unencumbered by old doubts or anxieties, having reclaimed, I think, some essential part of her self."