"Kids Like Me in China [is] quite simply tremendously important .
. ., must reading for everyone eager to understand some of the deepest issues of
adoption: connecting, belonging, and identity."
--Gail Steinberg, co-author of Inside Transracial Adoption"We don't have to wait until children are adults to help them tell their
own life stories. Kids Like Me in China is an inspiration for all adopted
children to begin to tell us what they think and feel about the early chapters
of their lives." --Jane Brown, MSW, adoption educator
"Now that our kids are getting older, they need to hear the voices of
their peers, not just adults, as they figure out where they came from and why.
Ying Ying is the first child adopted from China to tell her own story, and she
does it very well indeed. On the difficult issues of abandonment and why one
finds so many girls in Chinese orphanages, she combines a thoughtful, informed
understanding with a kid's straightforward approach to explain clearly what
parents so often struggle to discuss with their kids. This will be a great book
for the China adoption community." --Kay Johnson, professor of Asian
studies and politics at Hampshire College and co-author of "Infant
Abandonment and Adoption in China"
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Eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry is a Chinese American girl growing up in San
Francisco. But her story didn't begin there. Like lots of kids she knows, Ying
Ying spent her first months in China--in a birth family she cannot remember and
an orphanage in Changsha, Hunan province, where her American parents adopted her
when she was a tiny baby. When Ying Ying goes back to visit Changsha, she can't wait to see her
orphanage caregiver--someone who knew her and loved her when she lived in China.
Meeting Li Ayi is just the beginning, as Ying Ying discovers points of
connection with all the orphanage children--babies, toddlers and school-age
kids. Outside the orphanage she visits children at home, at playgrounds and at
school, and these friendships too help her see her life story in a new light. A
child of two countries, Ying Ying is determined to claim both as her own.
Kids Like Me in China combines real-life photos with the forthright
observations and complex feelings of an adopted child as she ponders what her
early life might have been like. The first view of China adoption from a child's
perspective, Kids Like Me will inspire all adopted children to take charge of
their own life stories.
Ying Ying Fry is in third grade at the Chinese American International School
in San Francisco, where she studies all subjects in both English and Mandarin.
She is a Junior Girl Scout and likes to play soccer, draw, read and write
stories. She wrote this book with help from her mom, Amy Klatzkin, a
contributing editor to Adoptive Families
Magazine and the editor of A Passage to
the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China.
Brian Boyd, the lead photographer, is the author of
When You Were Born in
Korea and the father of two daughters adopted from Korea. He lives with his wife
and children in St. Paul, Minnesota. Ying Ying took a few of the photos, and
others are by her dad, Terry M. Fry, a founding board member of San Francisco
Bay Area Families with Children from China. All photos were taken in Hunan, all
but one in December 2000.
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