Since the Chinese government instituted its one-child policy in 1979, hundreds of thousands of babies have been left for adoption, most of them female. Inspired by her own adopted infant, documentarian Linda Goldstein Knowlton follows four Americanized teenage girls as they negotiate the duality of being Eastern-born and Western-raised, and of feeling like foreigners in both regions. The film is overcrowded with story lines and short on thrust, but fortunately, its protagonists carry the day with their candor and precocious poise. Even with the camera running, and her adoptive mother looking on, when Nashville-raised Haley meets the woman who abandoned her, the enigmatic expression on her face hovers somewhere between relief and grief, empathy and rage.
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