Adopted from China, tonight she is a woman.

Fu Qian, renamed Cecelia Nealon-Shapiro at 3 months, was one of the first Chinese children — most of them girls — taken in by American families after China opened its doors to international adoption in the early 1990s. Now, at 13, she is one of the first to complete the rite of passage into Jewish womanhood known as bat mitzvah.

She will not be the last. Across the country, many Jewish girls like her will be studying their Torah portions, struggling to master the plaintive singsong of Hebrew liturgy and trying to decide whether to wear Ann Taylor or a traditional Chinese outfit to the after-party.

Having recently survived the local FCC Little New Year festivities (and enjoyed them, mind you), I've naturally been thinking about the ways in which Chinese culture is presented to my kids.

I sometimes feel like it should be in quotes: "Chinese culture," since, guess what, we're not Chinese. But, well, everybody loves a good lion dance.

And, y'know, any excuse to eat.

Olivia Rauss, a girl in Massachusetts who celebrated her bat mitzvah last fall on a day when the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot coincided with the Chinese autumn moon festival, said she saw no tension between the two facets of her identity either.

“Judaism is a religion, Chinese is my heritage and somewhat my culture, and I’m looking at them in a different way,” she said. “I don’t feel like they conflict with each other at all.”

And it's the strange ways culture and heritage interact in this story -- the things that are handed down from the past -- that really interest me.

So on the one hand:

“In my fantasy,” Ms. Nealon said, “we’d take her to Chinatown and have this incredibly beautiful Westernized Chinese dress made.”

But Ms. Shapiro said: “She wanted no part of it. For her, this has nothing to do with being Chinese.”

But on the other hand:

On Feb. 17, nearly 200 of Cece’s friends and relatives filed into the vast Romanesque sanctuary of Rodeph Sholom. A box of commemorative yarmulkes with the yin-and-yang pattern sat by the door. Six alumnae of Cece’s orphanage — they call themselves the Fu sisters — had flown in from all over the country.

There's a lot to learn here, I thinks. I'm also beginning to figure out that Daughter already knows it, and it's up to me to get her to teach me.