Two baby girls began their lives as orphanage crib neighbors in China. Sixteen years later those girls — by then Americans named Maya and Jennie — returned together to their rural China "hometowns." There, with girls their age who grew up in these farming towns where they were abandoned as newborns, Maya and Jennie found clues about their missing girlhoods.
Maya and Jennie are sharing their discoveries as stories – on the Web and as iBooks. Now Touching Home in China has created lesson plans so we can bring the girls' cross-cultural stories into classrooms – by sharing our Open Source digital resources with teachers and students around the world.
We need your support to make our outreach efforts to teachers, principals, families and organizations succeed.
Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods tells interactive stories about a first-of-its-kind experience as American adoptees and Chinese girls get to know each other in their shared "hometown" in China and tell each other about their divergent lives. With their new Chinese friends as guides, Maya and Jennie learn about girlhoods they might have been if China's one-child policy hadn't pressured their birth families to abandon in these towns.
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Touching Home in China breaks new ground not only with its cross-cultural content but in its presentation. Videos are integrated into the narrative text on iBook pages, awaiting fingers to touch and play them. A column away, fingers can scroll through documents and hear them being read aloud in Mandarin while reading an English translation on the page. Like the videos, documents and photos expand to fill the screen. Galleries of photos, interactive maps and informational graphics invite deeper explorations. Digital natives tend to head first for our "Movies," as parents gravitate initially to the words.
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We've also coded from scratch an elegant, unique and easily navigated website to display and share the girls' stories and aligned Open Source digital curriculum.
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Beyond Adoption
Many Americans begin their lives in different places than where they are raised or where they are living. Like adoptees, immigrants wonder what it would be like to go "home." Will the people back "home" accept them? Welcome them? What pieces of the home they and their family left — perhaps before they even have a memory of being there — is a part of the person they've become after moving away, physically and culturally? Touching Home in China speaks to the immigrant journey, as well.
Touching Home in China is becoming a valuable learning resource through the efforts of curriculum writers who have joined our team. Two 8th grade classes sampled its pilot chapter and the students gobbled it up, eager to participate in the spirited teacher-led discussion. What the girls explored offer excellent prompts for classroom discussion about identity in a multicultural society; the challenges of ethnic and racial identity; gender issues as seen through girls' changing lives in China and that nation's population policies; cultural assimilation and displacement in a time of globalization; and effects of the rapid pace of China's transition in the past two decades, as reflected in its girls' lives, to name a few.
Your tax deductible contribution helps us bring this unique resource to students from middle school to early years of college.
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"Touching Home in China" touches the sweet spot in teachers' wish lists with its compelling content, interactively presented."
— Peter Gilmartin, Program Director at Primary Source (Educating for Global Understanding)
Our Impact
No story like this one has been told. While it's primed for digital natives, it's easy for anyone to navigate and promises an immersive, transmedia storytelling experience. Given the global reach of our social media ecosystem, our iBooks have traveled far and are already making a powerful impact.
The makers of Touching Home in China have proven records of accomplishment. Melissa Ludtke, its producer and writer, is an award-winning magazine journalist and mom to Maya, one of the American girls in the iBook. Jocelyn Ford, its Director of Photography, is a longtime foreign correspondent, a former Beijing bureau chief for NPR's Marketplace, and her film Nowhere to Call Home had its US premiere this summer at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Julie Mallozzi, its video editor and iBook co-creator, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker; her film Once Removed tells a powerful story about her own family's roots in China. She teaches film at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Educators, nonprofit and NGO leaders in the United States and China tell us how eager they are for Touching Home in China to become a resource. Adoptive families with children from China urge us to hurry up and publish the entire series (we are working hard to do this) so their children will have these stories as they move into and through adolescence. College students adopted from China are forming their own supportive networks and this story resonates with them.
How You Can Help
By contributing what you can! It's a tax deductible contribution, passing through our 501(c)3 fiscal sponsor, Filmmakers Collaborative. Other non-monetary ways that you can help out are at the end of this message.
What Your Contribution Supports
Your tax-deductible contribution enables us to bring
Touching Home in China into schools with a dynamic and engaging curriculum that is now being developed.
Other Ways To Help
