When Mei-Ling Hopgood's Taiwanese parents gave her up for adoption as an eight-month-old baby, it wasn't because they didn't love her. She was a beautiful, healthy, good-natured little girl. But five sisters preceded her, and her parents, who were poor farmers, felt they couldn't raise her. Besides, Mei-Ling's father wanted a son and, to make room for a boy, he believed he'd have to let go of her.
A Taipei-based American nun, Sister Maureen Sinnott, arranged Mei-Ling's adoption by a family in Michigan. But surprisingly, the handover did not mark the beginning of a mournful existence. Quite the contrary: Hopgood looks back on the day she was flown to the US as the luckiest of her life.
Hopgood chronicles her odyssey - from undervalued sixth daughter in a traditional Chinese family to beloved adopted first child in a privileged American home - in her memoir Lucky Girl.
While the book follows her personal story, it also offers a journey into Chinese culture and a tour of the fascinating sights of Taiwan and its food customs. The book reveals the personal suffering wrought by the archaic social traditions: the institutionalised preference for male progeny over female counterparts.
From the start Hopgood thrived in the US, taking to her new upper middle-class existence with a vengeance. While her biological sisters toiled in the fields of rural Taiwan, their little sister watched Sesame Street and went to dance and swimming classes. She lived in a red, white and blue room in a modernist home her adoptive father had designed. She was a pompom girl, class president and valedictorian - in essence, the all-American girl.
'I was Little Miss Everything,' she says. 'Really social and energetic.' Her American parents were highly regarded teachers and community leaders. When she was young, they also adopted two boys from South Korea to round out their family of five. 'My parents were dedicated to our happiness. I had the opportunity to get a good education, travel, and do whatever else I wanted to do career-wise.'