Library: Asia

China

ID Code Title Author Description Home(s)
13939 CH1 Falling Leaves – The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter Adeline Yen Mah, Penguin Books, 1997 Thought to bring bad luck because her mother died giving birth to her, Adeline Yen Mah was discriminated against by her family all her life. Falling Leaves is both the moving story of how she survived that rejection and an enthralling saga of a Chinese family, from the time of the foreign concessions to the rise of Communist China and the commercial boom of Hong Kong.
13940 CH2 The Ford of Heaven Brian Power, Corgi Books, 1984 The autobiography of Brian's childhood raised by a Chinese amah (Chinese servant) while growing up in revolutionary Tianjin China during the 1920s and 1930s.

Korea

ID Code Title Author Description Home(s)
13941 K1 Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan Elizabeth Kim, Doubleday, 2000 Elizabeth Kim's mother committed the sin of sleeping with an American soldier, and producing not just a bastard, but a mixed-race child, considered worthless. Abandoned at a Christian orphanage in post-war Seoul. A childless Fundamentalist pastor and his wife in the United States adopted Elizabeth. After escaping her adoptive parents' home, only to find herself in an abusive and controlling marriage, Kim made a break for herself by having a daughter and running away.

Vietnam

ID Code Title Author Description Home(s)
13942 VIET1 Mama Tina: The inspiring sequel to Bridge Across My Sorrows Christina Noble with Greta Curran Browne, John Murray, 1998 Christina Noble was an orphan and a Dublin street child. In 1989 she travelled to Vietnam to care for the street children of Saigon – a sad legacy of the Vietnam War. Against extraordinary odds Christina Noble opened the Christina Noble Children's Foundation, a haven of foods, beds, medical aid and schooling where the street kids can find safety and protection by Mama Tina.
13943 VIET2 The Unwanted – A Memoir Kien Nguyen, Little, Brown & Company, 2001 After the fall of Saigon to the Viet Cong in 1975 this books tells the true story of Kien born to a Vietnamese mother and an American father who spent time in a refugee camp in the Philippines.

India

ID Code Title Author Description Home(s)
13944 IND1 Bitter Sweet Truth Esther Mary Lyons, Parker Pattinson Publishing, 2000 A revised and added version of ‘Unwanted’. See book IND2. An autobiography of the recollections of an Anglo-Indian born during the last years of the British Raj.
13945 IND2 Unwanted: The love child of an American Jesuit priest and an Indian Catholic nun Esther Mary Lyons, Spectrum Publications, 1996 The book is set in North India from the 1940s to the 1980s. It follows the dramatic story of the true story of girl who was the love child of an American Jesuit Priest and an Indian Catholic nun. Chapter 4 is about the writers’ experience in an orphanage.