‘Next time bring my daughter’: Barbara Demick reunited a Chinese family with the stolen ‘missing twin’ adopted in the US

At the end of a long road trip through rural China in 2009, American journalist Barbara Demick had an encounter that would change the course of her life. In the previous days, she had interviewed several parents whose children had been forcibly removed from them by government officials. Demick suspected there may be a link between the missing children and China’s booming international adoption industry.

She had enough for her story, but some instinct compelled her to follow the next lead to remote Gaofeng Village, high in the mountains of Hunan Province.

Her driver could only take her so far. The dirt road ended at a stream, where she was met by local woman Zanhua Zeng and her daughter Shuangjie. They guided her across a makeshift bridge and into the village where “everything was in the process of falling down or going up”.

There, she learnt about two-year-old Fangfang, daughter of Zanhua and twin sister of Shuangjie, violently taken from her aunt’s care in 2002. Government officials had told the family they were in breach of China’s One Child Policy and were not allowed to keep the baby. They had no idea what had happened to their daughter and sister.

Zanhua’s parting words were: “Come back again and next time bring my daughter.”

Review: Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, A True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins – Barbara Demick (Text)

Extraordinary consequences

At the time, Demick had no premonition of the significance the Zeng family and their story would play in her life – and those of many others. But in writing a front-page report for the Los Angeles Times about the links between China’s stolen children and international adoptions, including a small piece about the missing twin Fangfang, she started a chain of events with extraordinary consequences.

For Zanhua and Shuangjie, it would eventually lead to a reunion with Fangfang, accompanied by Demick, who helped organise it. She was to develop an enduring connection with the family – and with Fangfang’s adoptive American family, too.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove does what the best stories do: humanises a big issue. In this case, China’s one child policy and the international adoption industry it created.

Demick’s book is a story of China, and of incomprehensible government control. But as told through this case of the separated twins, it’s also a story of family, identity, loss and resilience.

It’s personal and moving, but also thoroughly researched, strengthened with compelling and confronting statistics and anecdotes.

Demick outlines the population growth that led to the introduction of the One Child Policy in 1979 and the rise of the State Family Planning Commission, set up to enforce the law limiting most Chinese families to one child.

“Family Planning morphed into a monstrous organization that dwarfed the police and military in manpower,” she writes. “By the 1990s, it was estimated that eighty-three million Chinese worked at least part-time for Family Planning.” (By comparison, China’s combined armed forces were estimated to number roughly three million at the time.)

The organisation was “intrusive in the extreme”, with female workers having to report when they had their periods and, in some cases, show their blood-stained sanitary pads. After giving birth to their first child, women were forced to have an IUD or were sterilised.

People who violated the law received fines of two to six times their annual income. If violators were civil servants, they could lose their jobs. In rural areas, where people were less reliant on government jobs, the policy was implemented with “brute force”.

People were beaten. Sometimes their homes were demolished or set on fire. “If you violate the policy, your family will be destroyed,” read a sign on a wall not far from the Zeng’s home. Family Planning officials regularly checked even the most remote villages, sometimes tipped off by neighbours.

If a woman was discovered to be pregnant after having a child, she would be forced to undergo an abortion. The methods were “crude, often barbaric,” Demick writes. “Doctors would sometimes induce labor and then kill the baby with an injection of formaldehyde into the cranium before the feet emerged.”

Although Chinese people, particularly those from rural communities, often wanted to have bigger families, they had no power to fight the authorities. Those who tried to quietly subvert the system were ruthlessly punished.

These practices were so common, they were generally accepted. But when government officials started to take babies from families who had defied the policy, resistance grew. Other families started reporting cases like what had happened to Fangfang. Family Planning had forcibly removed children, refusing to provide any details about their whereabouts.

Officials miscalculated in 2005 when they dared to take a boy, Demick writes. He lived in a town, attended school and was not as poor as some of the other affected families. The school made a complaint, which was supported by a local politician. The boy was returned to his family after 29 days.

Hearing about this case emboldened other families to mobilise and fight back. These were among the first families Demick met when she travelled to cover the story of the missing children in 2009.

Child trafficking by ‘good Samaritans’

In the meantime, news was starting to emerge about the child trafficking of children through Chinese orphanages, with “good Samaritans” who “rescued” babies being paid increasingly large amounts of money. “The orphanages were competing with one another to procure babies,” Demick writes.

Chinese babies were in high demand for international adoption, and it had become a lucrative business. One Hunan orphanage director later told police they started a service to allow foreigners to adopt babies in 2001; they were charged a US$3,000 cash donation per baby. In some cases, the babies genuinely needed homes and families, Demick writes, but the payment was “in effect a bounty that incentivised a wave of kidnapping of female babies and toddlers”.

It gradually became clear that many of the children removed by Family Planning officials were among the wave of Chinese babies and toddlers adopted by families from other countries, all of whom paid significant fees to do so, as well as donating to the orphanages. It was later revealed that orphanages routinely fabricated information about how and where the babies had been reportedly left.

By the time Demick’s reports were published in 2009, nearly 100,000 babies had been sent out of China, more than half to the US. The worldwide number would reach 160,000 by 2024, when China ended its international adoption program.

Demick’s story about stolen babies, plus other reports from within China and elsewhere, stunned the international adoption community and parents of Chinese adoptees around the world. Until then, China was perceived to be the most ethical choice for international adoption. For adoptive parents who now feared their adopted children could be taken from them, the revelations were terrifying, Demick says.

One of these parents was a Texan women named Marsha. She and her husband Al had adopted two Chinese girls: Victoria in 1999 and Esther in 2002. Through developing connections among families who had adopted from China, Demick came across Marsha – and realised Esther may be Fangfang: the missing twin.

She was correct. However, the story was far from resolved, which explains, in part, why Demick had plenty of material for her book.

Reporter as dogged detective

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is a testament to dogged reporting. Demick’s skills as a researcher, interviewer – and effectively, a detective – imbue the book with substance and credibility.

She handles difficult subject matter sensitively, portraying the Zeng family in China and adoptive mother Marsha in the US with empathy. She acknowledges the challenges they faced and recognises their devotion to their children.

Her descriptions of the twin sisters, Shuangjie and Esther, are perceptive and gentle. Restraint is a powerful writing tool and Demick uses it here to great effect.

This is the moment where the twins first meet, outside the Zeng family home in China:

When everybody was out of the van, the two of them stood next to each other, side by side, facing the photographer. Nobody embraced. Nobody spoke. I imagined the twins as bride and groom in an arranged marriage, meeting for the first time, willing to pose for the photographer but not yet able to engage in conversation.

Demick came to this story with the perspectives and limitations of an American journalist, but has gone to remarkable lengths to hear and convey the voices of Chinese people impacted by the One Child Policy.

At the same time, she challenges Western paternalistic ideas around adoption, questioning the view expressed by many she encounters that the Chinese children adopted by Westerners were lucky, guaranteed to have better lives elsewhere.

China’s One Child Policy was not formally abolished until 2015. In its 35 years, it did almost unimaginable damage, concludes Demick:

the policy shattered marriages, led to the deaths of countless children and suicides of parents, and left China with a population expected to continue declining into the next century. It was all encompassing, leaving almost everyone a victim or perpetrator or both.

For the hundreds of thousands of children sent out of China during this period, the legacy of One Child endures. As Demick writes, they are

citizens of their adopted countries but tethered by blood to another family and country they struggle to comprehend. Living in this in-between space between worlds.

In dedicating Daughters of the Bamboo Grove to Chinese adoptees around the world, Demick says she hopes in some small way it helps them to understand where they came from, and how they got to where they are today.

Kathryn Shine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.