Learning lessons in how to belong

When Emily Prager's first volume of stories, A Visit from The Footbinder, was published in 1983, both book and author had about them a faint air of the young Colette. There was the same cat's face - pointed chin; huge, disturbing, eyes. And the writing was feline, too: playful, with a sharp undertone of menace, particularly in the title story, which told of a six-year-old Chinese girl, Pleasure Mouse, on the day of her appointment with the footbinder.

Almost 20 years later, and in her new book, Wuhu Diary, Prager is again writing about a little Chinese girl and a visit. But this time the child is her adopted daughter, LuLu, and the visit is a pilgrimage to LuLu's birthplace, Wuhu. At three days old, LuLu was abandoned in the street, with a note giving her Chinese and Western birth dates. She was transferred to an orphanage and, at the age of seven months, adopted by Prager.

Prager describes their return to Wuhu, five years later, as a "roots" trip for LuLu. But of course, LuLu's is not the only narrative. With her decision to adopt a child from another culture, the story of Prager's own life has taken a dramatic new turn as well.

Her account of life before LuLu is kept to a modest minimum, but we learn that her parents divorced when she was seven, and that Emily, "a sad, confused little girl", went to live with her father in Taiwan. We learn, too, that one of the threads of Prager's story is the not uncommon one of a woman discovering a desire for motherhood at an age - 40 - when biology is no longer prepared to co-operate.

So the trip to China is a journey to a place that represents, at some level, "home" for both mother and daughter. There is also a sense that Prager's expectations may have included a desire for an endorsement of her maternal role. At one point she describes a fantasy of tracking down her "in-laws" - LuLu's natural parents - and becoming part of their household; learning from them to garden, to cook and, by implication, to belong.

These are difficult feelings and the ordering of them into coherence would have required a ruthless self-revelation at which Prager, understandably, balks. A phrase in the publicity material, describing Wuhu Diary as a "return to journalism", struck me initially as odd. The word "journalism" implies a kind of disengagement from what is being reported, which sits strangely with the barbed resonances of personal history.

But the publicist is right. Wuhu Diary is journalism - of an elegant and thoughtful kind, but lacking the depth and strangeness that made Prager's early fiction so arresting. It is asking a good deal of a woman that she should write about her child and herself as a mother with the same fierce artistry that she brings to her fictional creations. But people have done it: Colette, for one, and for another Rachel Cusk, whose own account of motherhood is published later this year. Once or twice, I thought I caught in Prager's text the sense of a well suppressed but violent struggle between Prager the writer and Prager the mother.

In this book, rather to its detriment, the mother seems to have won.