Book Review: One In One Out

Title: One In One Out

Author: S.R. Mallery

Date: 2024

Quote: "[T]he anxious mother scurried through the streets of Beijing to place her little one on their local church's front steps."

For a few years before and after the turn of the present century, China's government tried to force people to do the public-spirited thing and have one child or none. Birth control devices are only 95 to 98 percent effective; they often disappoint young people who can't afford a child, and one type is especially likely to disappoint a couple who have just had one child. So, while her daughter Huan is still a baby, Fen gives birth to another daughter she calls Ning. 

This family are not based on a specific person. Hundreds of families were in their situation. They are "typical" of one type of family who put a child up for adoption overseas. While some of these families didn't want children anyway, others wished they could keep two or more children and often thought of the children they had given up. Fen is that sort of mother. And, while some of the Chinese-American children just enjoyed being American, Ning wanted to know more about her family of origin. Easy though it is for people to be lost in a city the size of Beijing, as soon as she's old enough Ning wants to go to Beijing and search for her real mother.

This is hardly a book so much as a teaching story, aimed at readers a little younger than most of the Chinese-American children would be by now. (Most of them are legally adults.) If you are, or you have a foster or adoptive sibling who is, Chinese-American and your family are not Chinese-American, you too might want to try to find your original family. If they left clues to help you, they may want to be found. If you do find your physical relatives, you may like them. The story is very simple, perhaps overly optimistic.