Separated as Toddlers, Raised on Opposite Sides of the World

New York Times

24-05-2025

The men who came to snatch the toddler were from an agency known as Jisheng Ban: Family Planning.
The child's aunt was home alone with her on the late-spring morning when the intruders began flooding through her door. Her village, amid the rice paddies and pomelo orchards of China's Hunan Province, was isolated. But now the outside world threatened.
Some of the assailants held the woman's arms and legs; others ripped the 21-month-old's grip from the hem of her shirt. The men then climbed into a waiting car with the child and sped away.
The story of the stolen child — known as Fangfang as an infant and Esther as an adult — is the subject of Barbara Demick's entrancing and disturbing new book, 'Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.' It follows the girl's grotesque odyssey from a Chinese orphanage, to which she was brought by the human traffickers, to the home of the evangelical Christian family in Texas who adopted her. To make matters even more dramatic, the girl eventually came to discover that she had an identical twin sister who'd been raised by her birth parents back in China.
Demick, a former foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and author of several other books, including the National Book Award finalist 'Nothing to Envy,' about North Korean defectors, is one of our finest chroniclers of East Asia. She hammers together strong, solid sentence after strong, solid sentence — until the grandeur of the architecture comes into focus.
Demick's characters are richly drawn, and her stories, often reported over a span of years, deliver a rare emotional wallop. It is impossible to forget, for instance, the young lovers in her North Korea book who look forward to power outages so that they can spend time alone together in the dark.
This book, too, will inspire strong feelings. Its backdrop and context are China's ambitious and misguided attempts to limit family size — referred to, somewhat misleadingly, as its 'one-child' policies.
Starting in 1979, and continuing for the next 36 years, Chinese authorities policed the most intimate of activities — procreation — sometimes through brutal tactics including forced sterilization, late-term abortions using formaldehyde syringes, vandalism of violators' property and even kidnapping. Monitors who kept track of women's menstrual cycles were derided as the 'period police.' By one estimate, around 83 million Chinese worked in some capacity for Family Planning units by the 1990s.
Human rights advocates sounded the alarms. American evangelicals, in particular, viewed the initiatives through the prism of domestic abortion politics. Opponents chafed at traditional Chinese society's preference for male children, who were relied upon to provide for their parents in old age. (Tellingly, a common girl's name in China is Yaodi, which means 'want little brother.')
In a widely circulated incident in 1983, a Chinese father, hoping for a son, threw his daughter down a well as she screamed, 'Baba!' The episode outraged Americans, spurring some activists — including the parents who raised Fangfang — to adopt Chinese children as a form of rescue. 'What God does to us spiritually,' 'he expects us to do to orphans physically,' the megachurch pastor Rick Warren declared, 'be born again and adopted.'
There is plenty to be appalled by in China's enforcement. But the horror stories also have a way of feeding Cold War-style orientalism. The rescue narrative — civilized West, backward East — distorts a great deal. To start, China's policies were themselves rooted in Western science and economics, as the scholar Susan Greenhalgh has shown: They were conceived by Chinese rocket scientists seeking to reduce its population and thus raise its G.D.P., making the nation more competitive in global markets as China liberalized. They were a product of capitalism as much as communism.
This was certainly true when it came to the market for babies. In 1992, Beijing opened its doors to international adoptions, eventually fueling a black market for trafficked children. As a journalist working in China at the time, Demick was early to raise awareness of the problem. She wrote a story in 2009 headlined 'Stolen Chinese Babies Supply Adoption Demand,' and then followed one lead after another until she was able to identify Fangfang's family in Texas.
Demick herself is a central participant in this drama. Initially, upon discovering the girl's identity, she had to sit on the news. The adoptive family, fearing the potential upheaval, did not want to talk, and Demick made the difficult decision to conceal the child's exact whereabouts from the birth family. Years later, however, a member of the adoptive family sent Demick a tantalizing Facebook message; they were ready to discuss the case.
The twins ultimately reconnected, meeting up in video calls and later in China. But the encounters never feel wholly without tension. At one point the girl's birth father asks her adoptive family, 'How much did you pay for her?'
Demick is at her most coolly analytical when she writes in economic terms — including about herself. The essayist Joan Didion was once asked how it felt to encounter a 5-year-old child who was tripping on LSD as she reported one of her pieces. 'Let me tell you,' Didion replied icily, 'it was gold.' One has the sense, reading this book, that Demick knows she is in possession of gold. It is an extraordinary yarn, the kind reporters dream about.
But journalists, too, are subject to the imperatives of production and consumption. 'My finances weren't flush,' Demick acknowledges at one point, calculating how much it would cost for her to reunite the girls herself. She persuades her editors to foot some of the bill; the price, of course, is that she will share the intimate details of their reunion with the world.
If there is a flaw in this excellent book it is only that the story of a single family — even, and perhaps especially, a story as dramatic as this one — is not a great vehicle for understanding Chinese family-planning policies as a whole. The initiatives, spread over three and a half decades, were too diverse, varying from region to region and time to time, to be grasped through a single sensational experience of this kind.
Fortunately, Demick resists the impulse to tie things up in a neat bow. She leaves us uncertain about who is better off — the twin raised in China or the girl who grew up in Texas. That sense of uneasiness, born of an impossible desire for something whole, is a hallmark of Demick's work.
We long to be part of families and nations and churches — part of something larger than ourselves. But American or Chinese, we live in a market-driven, hyper-individualistic world. In a way, we are all orphans in exile.