A dramatic and moving novel by Ting-xing Ye, the internationally acclaimed author of ?A Leaf in the Bitter Wind'.

Grace Dong-Mei is adopted and taken to Canada. Watching the Tianenmen Square massacre on television prompts her to explore her Chinese ancestry and she begins to unlock the truth about what really happened to her almost 20 years before.

Grace Dong-mei Parker is adopted. Of the thousands of infant girls abandoned in China since the introduction of the one-child policy, she was one of the lucky ones, taken by a loving family to start a new life in Canada.

A typical teenager, she is reluctant to dwell upon the parts of the past that make her different from her friends. But watching the Tiananmen massacre on television prompts her to explore her Chinese ancestry and she begins to unlock the truth about what really happened to her almost twenty years before.

Told in part through the voices of her ancestors, this is a moving portrait of a family tree struggling to branch through cultural, geographical and political divides.

Ting-xing Ye, born in Shanghai in 1952, was an English interpreter for the Chinese government before leaving China in 1987. Her memoir, ?A Leaf in the Bitter Wind', has been published in nine countries. She is also the author of three children's picture books and the award-winning ?White Lily'. She lives in Orillia, Ontario.

2006-04-14 Recommended reading for adults and children.

This is one of the best Young Adult books I've read. It is well written and brilliantly illustrates the problems caused by the one child policy in China.
Grace, or Dong-Mei, lives in Canada. As far as she is concerned, she is Canadian like her parents and sister, even though she was born in China.
As she gets older, things crop up that remind her that she is "different". When the masscre in Tiananmen Square brings China to the forefront of the Western news, Dong-Mei is prompted to return to China to investigate her roots.
Told in parallel with Dong-Mei's life in Canada, we learn something of the history of her Chinese family and how she came to be abandoned in a Chinese orphanage.
Eventually the two stories link together forming a fascinating, infotmatve narrative.