Ricki Mudd is an all-American girl with two entire families on two different continents. She has parents and siblings in the US, and parents and a sibling in China. Most of us find it difficult enough to handle one set of relatives. Ricki has two – and some of them don’t much like each other.

Ricki is one of 100,000 unintended consequences of China’s so-called one-child policy: 100,000 children, mostly girls, adopted internationally in the past two decades (often because parents wanted to save their “birth quota” for a boy). Most of the children were abandoned without identification so they do not know who their birth parents are or why they abandoned them. Ricki is one of the rare few who does know what happened. Sort of.

Some of those 100,000 children – probably a majority – have absolutely no interest in their own ancient history in China. Many are teenagers; the last thing they want is yet another mother to deal with. My two adopted Chinese teenagers fall into that camp: virtually any subject interests them more than that one.