On the last Thursday of every month, at exactly 7:00 P.M., my adoptive mom would get me ready for our OCD meeting. She'd dress me in a red, too-tight, traditional cheongsam, braid my hair into a single, thick braid, and hand me a pair of Chinese slippers.

"You look terrif," she'd say.

"You forgot to bind my feet," I'd tell her with a straight face.

OCD—"Our Chinese Daughters"—was started by one of the area's adoptive mothers in order that we, Asian teenagers with dreams of waking up blond and round-eyed, would instead embrace our own culture. There were six mother–daughter pairs, and we rotated houses. The event was described—someone actually had stationery made up&mndash;as an evening of "lively discourse, lukewarm coffee, and lots 'o' hugs." The hosting couple was expected to do a few things: provide some sort of Far Eastern cuisine, come up with a discussion topic, and run the rest of the family out of the house.

At thirteen, I would have rather stayed home and drank bleach.

On a particularly hot night in May, an adoptive mom named Frieda Ratner announced that she'd be showing "an extremely thought-provoking video," that she'd taped on PBS. In Mrs. Ratner's basement—fancier than any room in our entire house—women drank Pino Grigio while their kids belted down orange Kool-Aid. Soon the lights went down, some girlish giggling started and was squelched, and a documentary played on the large-screen TV.

The film was about a woman named Gail who had adopted a daughter from some small village in Northern China. The girl was called Emily Rose, and on her fourteenth birthday, Gail decided to take her back. It was December, and the town looked about as inviting as the underside of a frozen pond.

Once there, Gail pulled out a stack of Xeroxed pages, and began stapling neon-colored flyers everywhere. Emily Rose, a typical "American" teenage with a talent for snapping gum, stood by uncomfortably.

A close-up of one of the flyers showed some Chinese text and two side-by-side photographs. The first was Emily Rose's "referral" picture and showed a skinny, disinterested-looking infant. The second was Emily Rose as she looked now, older but still skinny and no less disinterested.

"This is my daughter who was abandoned at three-and-a-half months old," the film's narrator translated from the flyer as the camera focused on the baby picture. "And this is her now." The camera held on the face of the living Emily Rose as a crowd started to form.

At this point, a woman stepped from the crowd. She was crying and her hands were shaking. She grabbed the teenage girl in an embrace so tight that it sent the wad of bubble gum flying from Emily Rose's mouth.

The crowd voiced disapproval of the woman as Emily Rose screamed to be turned loose. Gail stood, hands slightly raised with that I-didn't-see-this-coming look on her face. Eventually, someone in a uniform led the woman away.

"Whether or not this person was truly the girl's mother is highly unlikely. What is likely, however, is that she either gave up a child of her own, or at least knows someone who did."

When the documentary ended and the lights came back on, six middle-aged women and six teenaged girls blinked at one another like strangers.

"Hope everybody's hungry," Frieda Ratner said as she came down the stairs with steaming platters of food.

When the plates and bowls and chopsticks were lowered to the serving table everyone was treated to the sight of the main dish—a bed of rice upon which rested white chicken breast covered with a yellow, beaten egg mixture.

It's traditional Chinese," Frieda Ratner announced. "They call it 'Mother and Child Reunion.'"