In her moving new memoir, The Year of the Water Horse, journalist Janice Page explores the deep emotional threads that connect three generations of women across culture, time, and circumstance her own mother, her Chinese mother-in-law, and her adopted daughter.
Page began writing while chronicling her family’s adoption journey in China, her husband’s ancestral homeland. There, she discovered that her mother-in-law had been forced to abandon her firstborn daughter during the country’s civil war. The parallel between her daughter’s adoption and her mother-in-law’s loss inspired Page to weave the two stories together.
“I realized I couldn’t separate them,” she shared. “One child was coming home to a land where another had once been left behind.”
Writing the memoir required Page to shift from reporter to subject challenge for someone used to telling others’ stories. “As a journalist, you’re never the story,” she reflected. “In a memoir, you must be.”
At its core, The Year of the Water Horse is about survival, forgiveness, and the resilience of women. Through confronting loss, Page found empathy not just for her mother and mother-in-law, but for herself. “It’s about what we endure, how we endure it, and how joy still finds us,” she said.
The memoir reminds readers that even in stories of pain, there is always room for understanding, presence, and healing themes that resonate deeply with anyone navigating identity, family, and belonging.