Introduction Summary

The Lost Daughters of China is an account of the personal journey of Karin Evans and her husband Mark Humbert in their quest to adopt a Chinese baby in 1997. Evans intersperses poignant anecdotes among research on the topic of abandoned female children lost in China's political and economic quagmire.

Evans begins her account by sharing the scope of the mass exodus of Chinese babies through adoption into the United States and other countries. At the time the book was written in 2000, an average of three hundred fifty babies enters the United States each month to waiting adoptive parents.

Evans explains that the majority of the babies are girls, the result of China's attempts at population control in combination with the country's predilection for male children. Evans and her husband adopted a year-old daughter, named Kelly Xiao Yu, who had been born in the...