Touching Home in China
“Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods” features a multimedia series of six stories and related lesson plans in its cross-platform “transmedia” project. This is the first cross-cultural exploration of Chinese girlhood and contemporary China to offer global resources for digital native students.
The narrators are two American adoptees and six Chinese girls who were born in the same rural towns in China. The girls’ paths diverged dramatically when the now-Americans were abandoned as newborns. They lived in orphanage cribs for nine months in the nearby city of Changzhou. As teens, the Americans returned “home” to the farming towns in China where each had been left presumably by her birth family as an “out-of-plan” daughter in China’s strictly enforced one-child policy. The American girls’ mission: To discover clues about what it might have been like to grow up as a daughter in 21st century rural China. Chinese girls who were roughly their age became their guides; friendships bloomed as the girls built bridges across their cultural divides.
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