More than a One-Child Policy

Tue, Nov 5, 2019 @ 6:30pm - 7:30pm

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Voices of American Adoptees from China is a series of programs held throughout November 2019 in celebration of National Adoption Awareness Month. The series also commemorates the 40th year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China’s One-Child Policy.

In the first installment of the series, join us for a panel discussion that goes beyond the One-Child Policy and its common discussion points. Hear from a variety of experts to understand consequential issues resulting from the policy, most especially the changes in women's reproductive healthcare, relinquishment of infant girls, and rise of feminist culture in China. The discussion hopes to provide greater historical context and academic complexity around an initiative that catalyzed the largest and most unique transnational adoption network in human history. Panelists include Nanfu Wang (director, One Child Nation, to be released to Amazon Prime on November 8), Leta Hong Fincher (author, Betraying Big Brother), and Maya Ludtke (adoptee). Moderated by Melissa Ludtke (author, Touching Home in China).

Nanfu Wang is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in New York. Nanfu’s feature debut, Hooligan Sparrow (2016 Sundance Film Festival), was shortlisted for the 2017 Academy Award for best documentary feature. It also won a Film Independent Spirit Award, an IDA Documentary Award, a Peabody Award, a Cinema Eye Honors Award, and the George Polk Award. Her second feature documentary, I Am Another You, won two special jury awards.

Leta Hong Fincher is a journalist, scholar and author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, which was named one of the best books of 2018 by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Bitch Media, Foreign Policy Interrupted and Autostraddle. Leta has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Dissent and others. She won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for her China reporting and is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University's Department of Sociology in Beijing. She also has a master's degree from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree with high ho nors from Harvard University. Her first book is the critically acclaimed, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed 2014). Leta is currently an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University.

Maya Ludtke grew up in Cambridge MA and received a BA in Environmental Studies from Wellesley College with particular focus on environmental health and children. She currently works in education as the Learning and Development Coordinator for City Year Boston. Maya enjoys art and design, relaxing outdoors, and exploring new places.

Melissa Ludtke, a veteran journalist, wrote and produced a storytelling and educational project called Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods with her daughter, Maya. Melissa is an award-winning journalist who worked at Sports Illustrated, Time, CBS News and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She received the 2010 Yankee Quill Award for lifetime achievement as a journalist. During fellowships at Harvard University, Radcliffe College and the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she explored social issues with an emphasis on women, children and families. Random House published her book On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America in 1997 after she had adopted Maya as a single mother. 

When Melissa was 26 years old, she challenged Major League Baseball in federal court – and won. Her charge was gender discrimination. In pursuing her Constitutional rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, women sports reporters gained equal access to locker rooms where male reporters worked routinely. From then on, girls who loved sports and dreamed of reporting on games knew that they could. She is writing a narrative social history of her legal action during the time of the 1970s Women’s Movement; it is called Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside.