Book Review of Throwaway Daughter by Ting- Xing Ye

I recently finished reading ‘Throwaway Daughter’ by Ting-Xing Ye. This book was about Chinese girl named ‘Dong-mei’ adopted to Canadian family and live as ‘Grace’ for many years. Grace had confusion in her cultural identity between Chinese and Canadian. The writer of this book showed how Grace looked for her own identity and accepted it.

Grace was a girl from happy, small Canadian family. She had one older sister named Megan but Grace’s physical appearance was different from her family, because she was adopted girl from China. Grace’s mother, Jane wanted Grace to know about her biological mom. When Grace was young, she refused to know about her culture and hated it. However, when she was graduating from high school, she wanted to visit China, and look for her real mother. The author expressed every characters feeling specifically And this made me to feel as if I became Grace and looking forward to meet her mom.

In this book, Grace was protagonist, and there wasn’t any antagonist who distracted Grace, but there was internal conflict in Grace that whether she should learn about her original culture. This book showed how Grace felt about confusing two identities she had. Around her, she had good family who gave positive effects to her. Both her parents encouraged her to explore about Chinese culture and her family root. The main theme of this book is finding Grace’s real cultural identity, which was rejected to learn about it at first. As she learned about China through their language and such events like tianmen massacre, she found out her culture was interesting to know.

After reading this book, I felt lots of warm feeling and caring from Chun-mei to her precious and only one daughter, Dong-mei. Nowadays, the situation is different from the story. Although people have enough condition to take care of their baby, but many babies are abandoned just because their parents don’t want them. This made people to feel adoption as negative thing, but if you read this book, you wouldn’t say things like that. Adopting by kind family who can respect a girl’s own culture and encourage her to meet biological mom gave warm-hearted story. 

Reviewd by Juhee Park 14/11/13