Left alone in fields to die, abandoned in markets, killed at birth, or aborted before—this is the fate of many Chinese infant girls. Why? China is overpopulated, and a government policy restricts families to having just one child. In China little boys are preferred to girls, and wives are faced with constant pressure to produce a son. Of the girls who escape infanticide, some find their way to orphanages across China where a small fraction of them are adopted and brought across the globe to be raised by new parents as Americans.
When China’s Lost Girls opens it immediately grabs your attention. Fast cuts, extreme close ups, natural sound, and quick, up tempo music exclaims your arrival in China. But, soon, viewers find themselves transported to the United States where a young Georgia girl, Marissa, is preparing for a new baby sister and a new journey. Along with her adoptive parents, and accompanied by reporter Lisa Ling, Marissa will head back to China, back to the country where her birth mother abandoned her under a park tree. Marissa’s family is adopting their second daughter and Marissa’s first sister. They will soon join other American families all traveling together with the same purpose.
What is great about China’s Lost Girls is how Lisa Ling is able to keep viewers interested despite the complexity of the topic. While Ling is, in effect, telling the story of Marissa and the other American families they are only serving as a catalyst for the bigger story of China’s one child policy and the consequences of such a law. It’s a useful storytelling technique that personalizes the bigger story as a whole. China’s Lost Girls utilizes this technique well throughout the documentary. Each and every time the show shifts focus, viewers are introduced to someone new. In one segment, Ling travels to the countryside to explore the cultural desire for a boy, and viewers meet a young woman who decided to keep her daughter in spite of her husband’s threats he would send her away if she did not give him a son. This woman’s story shifts into the broader story of family planning initiatives in the rural countryside.
In addition, Lisa Ling makes sure to include interviews with people from all different perspectives. She talks with little Marissa, rural Chinese, urban Chinese, American parents, Chinese foster parents, family planning officials, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and schoolchildren. Interwoven within these are clips with Chinese-American girls who each talk about their feelings of being adopted and, what they believe, is the story
of how they arrived in America. Each of these brief clips serves as transition pieces between segments, while providing viewers with a deeper insight to what it must be like being one of China’s Lost Girls.
I first saw China’s Lost Girls when it was aired, in a re-run, as an episode of Ultimate Explorer a few years ago. I chose this documentary as my first entry because it was the show that originally got me hooked on National Geographic. I have already admired Lisa Ling greatly, as I had seen her a few times on Oprah, but since seeing China’s Lost Girls I have hungrily devoured issue after issue of National Geographic Magazine and other National Geographic shows. Now, as a Broadcast Communications major in my junior year of college, Lisa Ling has become my idol, and I look to her work often as a source of inspiration.
r birth mother abandoned her under a park tree. Marissa’s family is adopting their second daughter and Marissa’s first sister. They will soon join other American families all traveling together with the same purpose.
in my junior year of college, Lisa Ling has become my idol, and I look to her work often as a source of inspiration.
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