American journalist who adopted abandoned Chinese babies on why she chose China

Working through school I was born in 1955 and grew up in Detroit, a very car-centric city of mainly Italian and Polish immigrants. I was the child least likely to spend my life travelling around the world. I’d never been away from home, not even for summer camp, before I went to college. My high school was on half days because there wasn’t enough room for all the kids.

When I was 14, I worked half days at a Dairy Queen (fast-food outlet) and by the time I was 15 my best friend and I were managing the Dairy Queen. At 17, I started working at a bank. I went to school from 7am to 12pm and then worked at the bank from noon to 8pm. I also worked my way through college, it’s what people did back then and I hope my kids will, too.

Poultry wages in Ghana I went to the University of Michigan and it was there that I was introduced to the out­side world through one of the teaching assistants, who ate Chinese food. I did a double major in maths and English with a minor in French.

I spent a year in France and visited other parts of Europe – I was the typical flower child backpacking around Europe clutching my copy of Europe on $10 a Day. It was 1975, the year Francisco Franco died. I won a British government scholar­ship and did a second degree in medieval English and Greek at Cambridge University.

Although I’d never done any journalism, after I graduated I applied to the BBC and Reuters. I didn’t get a job, but a foreign editor at the Financial Times (newspaper) helped me get a job as a university lecturer in Ghana. I arrived in 1980. We didn’t have running water or electricity and part of our salary was a live chicken that was presented at Christmas. I shut the chicken in my flat and asked one of my students to help me strangle it so we could eat it.