Reviewed by Kristin Benson

China Ghosts, a memoir written by journalist and father, Jeff Gammage, is about … well, China. (It is also about ghosts, primarily the kind that haunt one’s psyche.) In reading China Ghosts, we learn a little about Chinese history, culture and politics, and lot about his daughters, Jin Yu and Zhao Gu. While Gammage’s narrative takes us to China and back – twice — his story is really about the process of adopting girls from China. Except that it is not.

Thinking that I would be reading about another parent’s journey into parenthood – what I’d expected to be a much different journey from my own – I instead found a touching account of something so few parents are able to articulate: how we fall in love with our children. In surprising bursts of intimate and heartfelt language, Gammage is able to communicate both his love for his daughters and the deep and engulfing sense of responsibility that he has to them. He writes that many parents reduce their experiences to clichés (but that clichés are clichés because they are true). Fortunately, he is able to avoid this fate by artfully articulating both the gravity and levity of parenthood. While there is much about the relationship between Gammage and his daughters that is unique – for example, my father did not spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources in an attempt to track down the smallest clue about my first days of life – the strength of the book comes from how he translates these specifics into commonalities. Its strength lies in its resonance.

There is a scene toward the end of the film Children of Men in which the faint cries of a newborn are able to arrest the movement and hearts of a swarm of armed soldiers. While contextually and artistically worlds apart, this scene communicates a sentiment echoed in China Ghosts: our children hold the power to transform us, to make us better people, and, for this, we owe them the world.