Broken China

You fly halfway around the world clutching a snapshot in your hand, with little more to go on than a full money belt and an infinite collection of worries and hopes: It’s becoming a common experience for the growing wave of American families opting for foreign adoptions in China. And what if you’re handed the baby after so many months of juggling papers, waiting, staring at the picture…and three days later, you’re told to trade that baby in for a different one? What would you do?

Golden author David Ball’s new thriller, China Run, takes off with the violent consequences of that compelling premise. The novel was inspired by the story of an Alaska woman who, when caught in the same bind in 1997, ran with her baby and made it safely back to the United States. That woman’s experience, though harrowing, left no real trail of violence, but in China Run, the ensuing chase is fraught with dire consequences. The twist? Ball himself is also an adoptive parent, the proud papa of a Chinese girl who’s now six, but his experience was picture-perfect.

Still, he doesn’t think the draconian police state he depicts is far off the mark. “China is not a nation of laws — it’s a nation of men who interpret the law as they see fit on a day-to-day basis,” Ball says. To research the book, he went back to China, tracing the route followed by his plot and trying to get under the skin of a culture straddling deep-seated traditions and modern government edicts. “I was curious about whether or not I could find Chinese who would help in this kind of situation,” he says. “I wanted to find out how they cope with the government they have to live with.”

China Run’s denouement hinges on the unraveling of a seamy secret, but it’s also got its hopeful side, and so does Ball, who wholeheartedly continues to support Chinese adoptions, in spite of the plethora of mayhem in his fictional yarn. “Their culture is so different from ours; it’s difficult for us to understand,” he says. “I’m not sure I understand it now. But I do know that the Chinese love their babies as much as anybody on earth, and that they engage in spirited defiance against the government when they can.”