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My New Book - Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City
Thursday, June 4, 2026 by Becky Cerling Powers
Categories: Story Powerline
I’m super excited about my most recent book, Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City, the story of my family’s mystery relative, Laura May Richards. Mom always said that her elderly cousin looked like a little old lady who never went anywhere in her life. And since Cousin Laura refused to tell her stories – or at least the recent ones, the politically deadly ones – only a few of her friends from China realized what a stick of dynamite she was.
Laura appeared to be a shy elderly spinster. In fact, she was a nurse who once had led a life of wild adventure as an independent missionary in China, living in the same conditions as poor Chinese while rescuing over 200 children from bandits, Japanese soldiers, abandonment, famine, and other horrors. She could not even talk about – much less publish – her story after the Revolution of 1949, when the new atheistic government forced her to leave China in 1951 and executed her Chinese husband. Anything she said could be twisted into an accusation that could be used to kill or imprison one of the orphans or former volunteer orphanage workers.
After she died, I began gathering old letters and tracking down people who knew her in China. After 25 years of research and a trip to China, I self-published her story as Laura’s Children. Now Flare Books is publishing the updated version, Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City, which tells 3 stories: Laura’s adventures rescuing orphans during famines, wars, and revolution; my 25-year-quest to learn Laura’s politically dangerous story; and the coming-to-faith account of Laura’s adoptive granddaughter – the child and niece of two former orphans. The 3 stories combine in a moving tale about an international family uniting through faith across the boundaries of continents and generations.
Book Desciption
Laura Richards was a shy American nurse who moved to a remote North China village in 1929 to takein castaway babies. Through 22 years of famines, bandit invasions, and wars, she lived in the samepoor conditions as the Chinese peasants, while managing to save the lives of nearly 200 destitutechildren.
So why did she refuse the Chinese Communist Party’s offer to make her a national heroine? LauraRichards’ story was too dangerous to tell when she returned to the U.S. in 1951. But when she diedthirty years later, the old letters, photographs, and scattered bits of memoir that she left behind wereso intriguing to her second cousin Becky Cerling Powers, that Becky began a 25-year quest to discoverher quiet relative’s amazing story.
Eventually that quest led Becky to China and the orphans themselves. Today, over half a century afterLaura left China, her story and her children’s story can finally be told.
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