Journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood talks about her memoir Lucky Girl, the story of her adoption as a young girl from Taiwan, her middle-class upbringing in Michigan, and the reunion with her Taiwanese birth family at age 23.By Up to Date, May 4, 2009
Kansas City , Mo. –
Given away by her birth parents, but with the help of a benevolent nun and the determined persistence of her adoptive parents, Mei-Ling Hopgood eventually arrived into loving arms and a new home. Hopgood, knowing how she was fortunate to have escaped a life of poverty in Taiwan, thoroughly enjoyed becoming a big sister, attending college, and studying journalism.
Then, on her 23rd birthday, Hopgood received a call from her birth family, which lead to a reunion in Taiwan and the beginning of an emotional journey full of joyful discoveries and new friendships, but also dark secrets: obsession, infidelity, and a shadowy death.
Steve Kraske talks with Mei-Ling Hopgood about her book Lucky Girl, which details the true account of the tug and pull between her middle-class life in Michigan and that of a family thousands of miles away.
Additional Information:
The Adoption Triad Support Network KC meets each month in three different locations in the Kansas City area. For more information call 816 505 0328.
Mei-Ling Hopgood has written for the Detroit Free Press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, National Geographic Traveler, the Miami Herald, and has worked in the Cox Newspapers Washington bureau. She has been a recipient of the National Headliner Best in Show, as well as several other national and international awards. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with her husband and their daughter. A newspaper feature she wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the reunion with her birth family won a national award from the Asian American Journalists Association.
You can learn more about Mei-Ling Hopgood and her book here .