The Year She Left Us

At the heart of Kathryn Ma’s haunting first novel, “The Year She Left Us,” is a young woman who loses her way. Ari is 18 and home from a summer in China, where she worked for a company that takes Western families with adopted Chinese girls on “heritage tours.” They visit the orphanages and, sometimes, the places where the abandoned babies were first found: police stations, department stores and random patches of dirt by the side of the road. For these orphans, their “Finding Day” may be the closest approximation to the simple commonplace most of us take for granted — a birthday.

Ari was one of those girls. She was left in a Kunming department store and later adopted by a Chinese-American lawyer called Charlie, a single woman whose sister and mother also play a big part in her daughter’s life. Ari has been told that she’s lucky — “Lucky girl” are the first two words of the book — but she’s not feeling it, despite her grandmother’s reminder that “nobody has to know” she’s adopted; the “skin tone” of her adoptive mother “was exactly the same.” “It must be so much easier for you, having a Chinese family,” Ari hears again and again. “It should have been easier, but it wasn’t,” she thinks. “I felt stupid, alone and defective.”

Yet she inhabits a populated, socially connected world. Ari — her full name is Ariadne Bettina Yun-li Rose Kong — grew up in the Bay Area as a member of the Whackadoodles, a collective of “Western-Adopted Chinese Daughters, corralled on a monthly basis at a playground or a park so that the girls with white parents could see girls who looked like themselves.” The Whackadoodles go on field trips to San Francisco’s Chinatown “to watch lion dancers or eat special cakes or buy willow or forsythia or flowering quince branches for Lunar New Year and the Lantern Festival and Qingming and the Moon Festival too.” None of which Charlie’s Chinese-American family “had ever bothered to celebrate growing up in Palos Verdes.”

Kathryn Ma

Groups make their own idioms, and one of the pleasures of “The Year She Left Us” is the exuberance of the Whackadoodles’ expressions, like “Gotcha Day” and “forever families.”But there are forbidden words too. When Ari ventures to talk about how her parents abandoned her, “The A-word in my mouth felt dangerous and thrilling.”

The foundling may be a familiar figure in the history of the novel, most prominently in Dickens and the Brontës, but Ma gives us a striking 21st-century iteration. In 1992, China passed a law allowing foreign adoptions. Since then, Americans have brought home more than 80,000 Chinese children — most of them girls, because of China’s infamous one-child policy and a cultural prejudice that favors sons.

Read the whole book review, please go to the New York Time.

The Year She Left Us, by Kathryn Ma
Harper, 326 pages