PW: Your previous work of fiction, Empires of Sand, was a historical novel. What inspired you to write China Run, a story of Americans adopting an infant girl from China?

DB: My wife and I were in Malta researching another historical novel when this came up. We have a natural child, a boy, and we tried to have a second child, but it didn't work. In America, we were too old to adopt. We decided to try to adopt a Chinese child when we saw The Dying Room, a controversial British TV show that alleged that the Chinese, by virtue of the one-child policy, were abandoning vast numbers of girls or neglecting them in orphanages.

PW: Did you model the adoptions in the book after your own?

DB: Yes. The Chinese sent us a picture of this girl at three months, with frizzled hair and a few very vague facts. You stare at this picture, and she was lovely!

PW: Can you visit the orphanages?

DB: You don't usually get to see the orphanages. We did. We got to see who took care of our daughter, whom we named Elizabeth. Typically, the adoptive parent goes to a larger city and the authorities bring the babies in.

PW: In China Run, American women receive babies and are then told there was an error and they must return them. Did this happen to you?

DB: On the way to China, I heard about an Alaskan couple that had their baby for three or four days while waiting for paperwork to come through. [The Chinese officials] told the Alaskan family they must give the baby back and take a different baby.

PW: That started the wheels rolling?

DB: That started the wheels rolling. I was holding my child, and I thought, my God, what would I do? I have no rights. I communicated later with the woman in Alaska, and they went through a week of terror, back and forth, and they did not hand their baby over. They went to a provincial airport and were able to get a visa and fly out eventually. A happy ending.

PW: Your story is set in areas the typical tourist or adoptive parent never sees.

DB: Yes. When I returned, I covered virtually all the ground I talked about, except for military places.

PW: You use transliterated Chinese freely. Do you understand it?

DB: No! A wonderful person helped me. She's Chinese. When Allison is fleeing in a truck, the scared driver is abandoning her, and his rapid-fire Chinese coming at her makes it more terrifying. Once in China, I saw a man who was over 100 years old. The only word of English he knew was "FDR." When he was told I was from the United States, he kept shouting, "FDR! FDR!"

PW: Do you have any occupation other than writing?

DB: No, I'm a full-time writer now. The book I was working on in Malta is due next spring from Bantam, another historical novel, about the Ottoman Empire. And I'm taking the family to Europe this summer. I have some things I want to research and my son is a World War II buff.

PW: What about film possibilities?

DB: You never know. People are afraid to make this. "Who wants to make China mad?" they ask. There's major interest, but one parent company sent a note that it was trying to make a TV deal and warning not to do anything that's going to upset the Chinese government.