‘Mom, am I the missing twin?': the story of two babies separated by the Chinese state – and their emotional reunion

The Guardian

2 days ago

One night in September 2009, a widowed mother in Texas named Marsha was up late at her kitchen table, scrolling through correspondence, when she opened an email that would change her family's life. It was from an acquaintance who was sharing a newspaper article – as it happens, an article I'd written from China – about government officials who had snatched children from impoverished families to supply the lucrative adoption market. The article featured an interview with a nine-year-old girl speaking wistfully about her identical twin who had been taken away. 'A Young Girl Pines for Her Twin' was the headline.
Marsha had two daughters from China. She and her husband, Al, both employees of the defence contractor Lockheed Martin, had adopted when they were in their 50s, though they both had adult children from previous marriages and were looking forward to retirement. Their motives were largely humanitarian. Marsha, a devout Christian who'd once wanted to be a missionary, was saddened by the plight of baby girls who had been abandoned by their parents because of China's brutally enforced one-child policy. She'd been flooded with tears after reading an article in Reader's Digest about a man who threw his four-year-old daughter down a well so he could have a son. They had adopted their first daughter, Victoria, in 1999 and their second, Esther, in 2002.
'Could Esther be the missing twin?' the acquaintance, also an adoptive mother, had written in the email.
Marsha shook her head. There was no possibility. Confirming her daughters were asleep, she went to a hallway closet and pulled out a briefcase containing the adoption papers, then riffled through until she found what she was looking for: a certificate attesting to the child's origins and their legitimate status as an orphan. 'Shao Fuquan … found abandoned at the gate of the Qiaotou Bamboo Craft Plant of Shaoyang City on 4 June 2002 … We cannot find her natural parents and other relatives up to now.'
She was reassured. Then she turned to the article online and read more carefully. The twin had been taken near Shaoyang, China, where Esther's orphanage was located; a dozen local officials had 'stormed the house and grabbed the 20-month-old' on 30 May 2002. That was less than a week before the girl was supposedly found at the bamboo factory. The article also said the girl had a 'distinctive bump' on her left earlobe.
Marsha clicked on an accompanying photograph. It showed the mother, Zanhua, and her remaining nine-year-old daughter, Shuangjie (meaning double purity, in recognition of her status as a twin), sitting outside their home. She enlarged the photo so she could look more closely at Shuangjie's pouty lips, knowing half-smile and wide cheekbones. She recognised that face.
All the pieces fell into place. The dates matched. The description. Marsha and her husband had been puzzled by Esther's behaviour as a young child. Almost two-and-a-half when she came to the US, Esther had been slower to bond than their first daughter. Al had once remarked, 'It almost seems as if she's been raised.' Now it all made sense. There was one obvious conclusion: everything she'd been told about Esther was a lie.
Marsha cycled through powerful waves of emotion. Fear. Guilt. Betrayal. Sadness for Esther having experienced such a brutal trauma so early in life, sadness for the mother whose daughter had been taken away, sadness for the Chinese girl who missed her twin.
Anxiety swept over her. She was terrified that the journalist – me – would reveal Esther as the stolen twin. Reading comments on adoption websites demanding confiscated babies be returned to their birth parents in China, her worst fears were for her daughters. Al had died of lymphoma the previous year and the family was steeped in grief. She worried Esther was quietly suffering from this long-ago trauma, a wound that could be reopened if she learned what had happened. Marsha wanted to keep it a secret until the girls were old enough to understand, not that she fully understood herself. She vowed to say nothing to anyone except immediate family.
A few days later, Esther asked to use her mother's phone to message the fiancee of Marsha's son who was like a big sister to Esther and Victoria. Marsha had an old-­­style flip phone and as soon as Esther punched in Carrie's name, her last text popped up on screen. 'It's terrible for twins to be separated,' Carrie had written.
Esther couldn't understand why the topic of twins was suddenly of interest. But she sensed it was an urgent matter and may be related to her. By then, both girls had noticed Marsha appeared unusually agitated and distracted. When asked what was going on, she was evasive. There were hushed phone conversations that fell silent when the girls walked into the room.
At one point, Marsha went up to Esther and, without explanation, pushed her hair aside and snapped a photograph of the small bump on her left ear. Esther's tiny ear tag had never caused much concern before. 'I thought that was kind of weird,' Esther said later.
That same week, on an evening when Esther and Victoria had just come home from visiting friends, Marsha summoned them into her bedroom. Esther had a feeling of dread. Their mother's formality reminded her of the previous year when they had been summoned into the bedroom to be told their father had died.
'Girls, there is something I need to share with you,' Marsha told them. She began a long-winded account of how a scandal had erupted in China about babies confiscated for adoption, and how one of the babies had a twin sister who was looking for her.
Esther listened for a few minutes, then interrupted. 'Mom, am I the twin?' she asked.
Marsha was taken aback. Was there something Esther remembered? She stammered that she didn't know anything for sure, and in any case it was nothing to worry about, probably nothing that affected them.
Esther bided her time, waiting until one afternoon when Marsha was napping on the living room sofa, her laptop sitting on the kitchen table. Esther was a respectful daughter who didn't want to think of herself as a snoop, but she found herself quickly navigating to her mother's email. She clicked on the article sent to her mother, noting the detail about the bump on the ear.
When Marsha woke up from her nap, Esther blurted it out. 'If I tell you something, will you promise not to get angry?' she asked, barely waiting for the answer. 'I know now it's all true. I really am the missing twin.'
A few months earlier, in the summer of 2009, I had travelled with a Chinese news assistant to Hunan province to report on the story of children who had been seized by family planning, the euphemistically named agency that enforced the one-child policy. The families victimised were poor, rural, often living in the mountains without political connections or education.
The village where we met the twin and her mother was accessible only on foot, requiring a precarious walk over a crude bridge of logs tied together over a stream. Called Gaofeng, or High Phoenix, the village looked stuck between eras. Everything was in the process of falling down or going up. The old wooden homes were being replaced with new construction, houses that were unattractively built of dispiriting red brick. Everything looked incomplete, missing a roof or a window.
The family was living temporarily in what was little more than a log cabin, with a door of corrugated metal and a roof of plastic sheeting. Their worldly possessions appeared to be three pigs, one cow, a few chickens and a duck. Zanhua, the mother, told me they were building a proper house and that her husband was doing migrant labour in a nearby city to earn cash for the construction.
For lack of anywhere else to sit, we settled outside on low plastic stools laid out on the dirt. Shuangjie nestled close to her mother, sometimes resting her head on her mother's knee. She was a skinny slip of a child, small for her age, prettily dressed in lime-green polka-dot trousers with matching sandals and a pink T-shirt.
Zanhua did most of the talking. She had a friendly, open face and told her story with animation, but not excessive emotion or self-pity. Before the twins, she'd already had two daughters, and intended to stop there. But her father-in-law insisted she try again for a son to perpetuate the family line. To stay off the radar of family planning officials, who might have forced her to abort and even get sterilised, she hid out in late pregnancy and went into labour in a shack hidden in a bamboo grove just across the street from where we were speaking. Though they didn't get the coveted son, they loved their twins and had no intention of relinquishing them.
To avoid detection, they decided to separate them, taking Shuangjie to the city where Zanhua's husband was working, and hiding the other – Fangfang – in the care of Zanhua's brother and his wife. But family planning officials found out; they stormed the house, overpowered the wife and ran out with Fangfang.
Zanhua felt bad for her youngest daughter, who grieved for her missing twin, although they hadn't been together since infancy. 'Shuangjie,' she told me, pointing to the little girl draped on her lap, 'she always asks me, 'When are you going to get my sister back?''
The little girl, with some prodding, finally spoke up in a squeaky little voice. 'She would be the same age as me. It would be fun. We could play together, wear the same clothes and go to school together,' she said.
'Yes, twins shouldn't be separated,' Zanhua agreed. 'If it was possible, we'd want to take her back. I gave birth to her. I still want her, or at least to know where she is.'
By the time we had finished speaking, the sun was low enough that we sat in the shadows of the bamboo, which were crisscrossing the landscape like the bars of a prison. We couldn't stay much longer, as it would be hard to navigate out of the village in the darkness.
'Come back again, and next time bring my daughter,' Zanhua told me. I gave a noncommittal nod, and later wondered: why was I going to help this family find their missing daughter and not the others? Shuangjie had a twin sister, possibly an identical twin sister. As they matured, the girls would look alike. I thought, just maybe, that I could succeed.
When I got back to my office in Beijing, where I was bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, I thought about the missing twin. And I began to search. I found a Yahoo group for parents who had adopted from the orphanage in Shaoyang where I suspected she had been taken. (Babies set for adoption could be in the orphanage for up to a year because of the paperwork involved – including placing an ad for the child's birth parents in newspapers families in the villages would never see.) The adoptive parents were raising money to support the orphanage and often posted photos of their children. With the moderator's help, I identified several possibilities. The most likely seemed to be an older couple, Marsha and Al, who had two girls from China and had become passionate advocates of international adoption.
They had put up two photos of the girl they called Esther. One showed her at the time of adoption, a toddler with thin hair and downcast eyes. Another showed a well-dressed four-year-old in a puffy blouse with a smile stretching from cheekbone to cheekbone.
Was Esther actually Fangfang? Did she look like Shuangjie? I thought so, but I wasn't sure. I thought surely Zanhua and her husband could tell me.
Borrowing a technique from police procedurals, I plucked random photographs from the internet of Chinese girls of similar age and appearance. I printed out a sheet with eight colour photographs, interspersed among them the two of Esther. They were like mugshots. Not to raise anybody's hopes, I wrote a note saying that these were just photos of adoptees and maybe there was a slim chance one resembled their daughter.
I sent the photos through an intermediary. The response came back immediately. The Chinese family had identified the correct photos. They were certain.
Now what? I had heedlessly barrelled ahead, setting a challenge for myself to find the missing girl, without thinking about the next step or the implications for real people. I couldn't publish a story, given the girl's age, but I couldn't ignore the discovery either. Marsha hadn't returned my messages and her number was unlisted.
As I was debating what to do, the moderator of the Yahoo group – who had become an intermediary – passed on Marsha's plea that I stop trying to contact her. She and her family, mourning Al's death, 'are not ready or able to deal with this at present'. In the end, I sent some of the information I had collected to Marsha, through a relative, assuring her I didn't intend to write a story. I wrote to Zanhua and her family to say I had confirmed that her daughter was alive and well in the US, but they would be unable to contact her at this time.
But life didn't go back to normal, especially not for Esther. The revelation rattled her sense of security. Perhaps if she'd discovered her past later in life, she might have been gratified that her birth family loved her and she hadn't been willingly surrendered. But, at nine, her first reaction was alarm. She felt like a freak. She wasn't just another kid from Texas. Or just another Chinese adoptee, like Victoria, who had assumed a new identity. She had an entire previous life in China, another name, a storied past. And she had a twin – a half of herself that had been left behind. She didn't want to be a twin. Now China lurked as a threat.
'Does this mean I will have to go back to China?' Esther asked her mother.
Marsha assured Esther nobody could take her away. She would be her daughter for ever, a US citizen for ever. Victoria was fearful, too, not so much for herself as for her little sister. What if somebody from China came after her? Victoria dared not say her name aloud if other people could hear. When they were out, she'd simply call her 'E' – a nickname that persists to this day. Marsha installed a high fence along the perimeter of their yard. They kept the curtains tightly drawn.
Victoria and Esther were already curiosities in their community. They lived in a fast-developing but still-rural patch of Texas with strip malls and horse pastures. Their little town had almost no Black people, few Hispanics and, as far as they could remember, no other Asians. Once there had been a Chinese restaurant in one of the malls, but it had closed. At the mall, they drew stares. Children sometimes touched their hair.
Marsha had tried her best to make her daughters feel less isolated. When they were young, she drove them to gatherings of other Chinese adoptees in Austin. She bought the girls books and videos about China. It was a delicate balancing act, trying to make her daughters proud of their origins without shoving their ethnicity down their throats. She didn't force them to study Chinese. She understood that school-age children were keener to assimilate than to explore their roots.
As Esther reached her teens, she became more self-conscious about being Asian. She studied herself in the mirror, comparing her features and colouring with those of her blue-eyed, red-headed mother. Esther had an acute visual sensibility: she paid close attention to the people and landscape around her. At 14, she got a camera as a Christmas present and took it everywhere. She photographed her family, their cat, people in the neighbourhood. She developed an interest in fashion. It was hard to relate to the tall, leggy models. Esther was still under 5ft and Victoria only a few inches taller. She discovered Asian fashion blogs and was happy to see models who shared her body type. She had grown up watching Disney animations of pale, blue-eyed heroines but decided now that Mulan, the Chinese warrior, was her favourite. And she began thinking about her other half in China. She wondered whether her twin looked just like her, what she wore, what she was doing. She wondered if her twin ever thought about her.
Around the time she turned 16, she spoke to her mother about contacting her twin. And Marsha asked Sam, her son, to reach out to me for help.
In the end, it was easier to find Shuangjie again than her parents. At 16, she had already moved on from the village. She was a teaching intern at a preschool in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. She lived in a dorm with other young trainees. And, like most Chinese people her age, she was connected to the wider world through social media. She had her own smartphone and an account on WeChat, the ubiquitous app used by more than a billion people in China. A film-maker gave me her contacts. A colleague in Beijing messaged to give her a heads-up that we had news of her twin sister. I friended her on WeChat and she accepted. The lines of communication were open, and I was the go-between.
Marsha had suggested Esther start by writing a letter. A real letter, handwritten. They didn't want to text, or for the birth family to have their contact information. A few days later, a letter appeared in my mailbox. The handwriting was tidy, the spelling and grammar exact.
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Hello Shuangjie. I'm Esther. Please allow me to introduce myself. As you already know, I am 16 years old … I am short, just under 5ft tall, but I actually don't mind in the least. People guess my age to be about 13 or 14, which I think is funny. [A smiley face was inserted here.] How tall are you?
I recently started my own photography business … I love to cook/bake and I like fashion and art and music.
In January, we celebrated the lunar new year for the first time and we all wore red and I made orange chicken and fried rice which we ate with chopsticks. We also watched Disney's Mulan and decided to make it a tradition for every new year.
To avoid raising expectations that she was planning to move back to China, Esther added a pointed, though gracious, explanation: I am very happy and want you to know I have a caring and lovely family whom I love dearly.
I suggested Shuangjie write a letter in response.
Dear Esther, hello. My name is Shuangjie. I am 16 years old and an outgoing girl. I am about 150cm tall and the slightly chubby type of girl. I like playing ping-pong, badminton. I like to listen to music and do calligraphy. My favourite colours are white and black, and my favourite season is the fall: the temperature of the season is just right, not cold or hot. We very much want to see you and hope you and your family are not afraid. We won't snatch you away from your family. We understand. I hope we will keep in touch in the future. I really want to wear the same clothes as you, go shopping together and listen to music together. I think it's a magical thing that two people look very much alike. In school, teachers would call the wrong name because they can't tell us apart, and our friends would also be confused as to who is who.
The girls became pen pals, with me as the courier, translating and relaying messages. Esther wrote to me by email, which Shuangjie didn't use. Like most Chinese people, she preferred texting on her phone. Esther still didn't want to set up a WeChat account. She hadn't told Shuangjie her surname or where she lived.
Esther did send photos, and Shuangjie reciprocated. They looked alike. Flat, wide noses, flared at the nostrils, well-defined eyebrows, eyes that crinkled at the edges when smiling. They both had bright, infectious smiles, though Shuangjie's was less confident. Their most striking feature was their cheekbones, wide and pronounced.
This might have been the end of my involvement in this story. But over the summer, I was planning a trip to China, and it wouldn't be so complicated to route myself through Changsha to see Shuangjie in person and maybe revisit the village. I could also set up a video chat with an interpreter between Shuangjie and Esther. When I suggested it, they both jumped at the idea.
I booked a hotel, figuring we would need fast wifi for a video call, and Shuangjie arrived at the appointed time. The technology worked without a hitch; just like that, Esther's face popped up on the tiny screen. The girls stared at each other from 7,000 miles and 13 hours apart.
For what seemed a long time, they just examined each other. Neither said a word. Shuangjie's mouth was agape, a look of awe on her face. Then she broke into a big smile. 'I'm so happy I can finally see you,' she said.
'I can see you, too,' Esther replied.
The girls related best through gestures. Esther held up her waist-length hair and pulled it back to look more like Shuangjie. Shuangjie showed Esther a birthmark on her back, which Esther lacks. By the end of the call, we were all exhausted, physically and emotionally. But there was one more piece of business to attend to.
We had come this far on coincidences of timing and physical resemblance, but I felt we needed positive proof that the girls were twins. I had bought a simple collection kit online from a DNA testing lab. It consisted of a couple of cotton swabs and test tubes. Shuangjie rolled hers around inside her cheek for a few seconds and we put the swab back in the test tube and sealed it. We did it again with a second swab just to make sure.
As she was still a minor, I would need a parental signature to do the DNA test, which meant another visit to Gaofeng village, where the twins were born. It was 2017 – eight years since my earlier visit – and we were able to drive the entire time on paved road. The family was now living in a brick house, nestled under the terraced paddies crawling up the mountains. This time, Zanhua was away working in the city – the couple used to alternate, with one earning cash, the other staying home to mind the farm. Zeng Youdong, the twins' father, had stayed behind to prepare for the rice harvest. To my relief, he wasn't angry with me for waiting so long to tell him more about his missing daughter.
When I opened my laptop to show him photos of Esther, he couldn't peel his eyes away from the screen.
'You should tell her not to be afraid,' he said finally. 'I understand she is not coming back to live in China. Just to see her makes me happy.'
But it would not be quite enough. After the DNA test confirmed that Esther was in fact their missing twin, we started organising a visit to China over the lunar new year holiday, a traditional time for family reunions.
I'm not sure what I had expected when the families finally came face to face in February 2019. Tears and hugs, of course; perhaps somebody fainting or collapsing, begging forgiveness. That's what had happened when I had covered a reunion in Beijing a few years earlier, of an adopted Chinese boy with his relatives. In one of the video chats between the twins, they had shared fantasies of what it would be like to meet for the first time. ('It will be like magic,' Shuangjie had said.) None of the imagined scenarios prepared me for the long silences and reticence. I would soon learn that the Zengs were not a family prone to histrionics. They didn't show their emotions on the surface.
We filed silently into the family house and stood awkwardly, wondering what to do. Even Marsha was uncharacteristically quiet. Esther and Shuangjie faced each other across the table, avoiding eye contact.
Shuangjie led a round of introductions, using the precise Chinese terminology to explain family relations. There was the number one, the jiejie, or oldest sister, Ping, 23, wearing padded pink pyjamas. The second sister, Yan, 21. The parents had finally had a son, the didi, or little brother, now a lanky 16-year-old with a fringe hanging over a handsome if acne-marred teenage face. He nodded a greeting before ducking into another room.
Throughout the introductions, the parents hung back. The father, Youdong, stood quietly in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen, watching with a private smile – the same expression I recalled from when I first showed him photos of Esther. The mother, Zanhua, hadn't come out to greet us, instead busying herself in the kitchen, from which billowed clouds of smoke so pungent with red pepper that it made our eyes water. Only after she had carried out dish after dish of food – pork, fish heads with hot pepper, spicy cabbage – did she finally speak. 'Eat, eat, before it gets cold.' Those were the first words she spoke to her long-lost daughter.
The square table wasn't large enough, so the sisters and their husbands, the brother and assorted children were shuffled off to an adjoining room. We Americans were a big delegation – me, Marsha and Sam, Esther and Victoria. We squeezed on to wooden benches around the table with Shuangjie, her parents and an interpreter. We ate with red chopsticks out of white porcelain bowls.
That first meal felt like a formal banquet. Esther and Shuangjie stole glances but didn't dare look each other in the eye. Unlike many westerners, Chinese don't consider meals a time for conversation, but the silence felt stifling. Esther tried to break the ice with impeccable manners and grace. 'You are making me feel so welcome,' she said, instinctively pausing for the interpreter.
'I am having a good time in China … I'm glad to finally meet you.' Again, a pause.
Towards the end of the meal, everybody was starting to warm up, gradually letting down their guard. When the photographer pointed the camera at Shuangjie, she flashed him that distinctive smile and raised her fingers in a victory sign. Yes, she'd done it. She'd got her twin sister back. Esther gave her version of the same grin. Sitting side by side, it was for the first time possible to compare and contrast. Esther had a smattering of freckles, probably because, as an American, she wasn't as concerned as many Chinese women about avoiding the sun. The most striking difference was size. Shuangjie was larger, taller by 3in and proportionally heavier, though not overweight. It's not uncommon for identical twins to vary in size. But Esther was the first-born twin, who is usually larger at birth. It seemed the six months she'd spent in the orphanage had cost her several inches in height. But they were otherwise close enough in appearance to revel in all that they shared. 'It's like seeing another me in the mirror,' Esther exclaimed.
We came back to the village every day for the rest of the week, filing into the house, chattering amiably, taking the same seats around the table. On one visit Marsha gave the speech she had, in effect, rehearsed for nearly a decade, ever since she'd learned about Esther's past in 2009. 'Esther's name means star. She has been a bright star in my life,' she began. 'But I would never have adopted her if I knew she was stolen from you.'
'It was the situation, the government,' Youdong said.
'Still, it gives me pain knowing that my gain was your loss,' Marsha replied.
'I'm overjoyed just to be able to see her again.'
'I'm happy she can come here and be with her birth family. I want that connection to remain,' Marsha said.
'I'm grateful to you. I can see that you raised her very well,' Youdong replied.
Although we were seated on crude wooden stools, the formality of the discourse made it feel like one of those stilted US-China summits, the leaders facing forward, sunk into oversize armchairs, with a flower arrangement and interpreter strategically placed between them. Nobody quarrelled, but there were underlying tensions that bubbled to the surface. Youdong couldn't understand why Marsha and her husband, at a relatively advanced age and with adult children, came to China to adopt. And he was confused by the role played by Sam, who in his late 40s was almost the same age as him. 'I'm surprised Sam did not object to the adoption,' Youdong said at one point.
That took Marsha and Sam aback, both a little offended by the assumption that an adult son would have power over his mother, especially one as independent as Marsha. Sam tried to reassure them about how much he loved having Esther and Victoria as sisters.
About the finances of the adoption, Youdong was even blunter, so much so that the Americans cringed at his question. 'How much did you pay for her?'
Youdong knew nothing of international adoption, even less of the niceties of The Hague convention that was designed to guard against the outright sale of children. Marsha didn't lose her composure, but briefly explained the laws and answered directly. The adoption had cost $25,000, she said. Except for a $3,000 contribution to the orphanage, the fees were paid through the government's China Center of Adoption Affairs; they had not been dealing with child traffickers, and had been able to afford it because they sold their house.
It was an artful answer – it gave Marsha a chance to explain that Americans weren't just buying babies. And to emphasise gracefully that American adopters were not necessarily rich. Her family, in particular, was not.
Over our last meal, Youdong made an exception to his policy of not drinking alcohol by serving us warm rice wine, brewed at home with rice grown in their own fields. We had a series of toasts and a few more speeches.
'From now on, I will call you Mom and Dad,' Esther told her Chinese parents through the interpreter. Marsha nodded her assent.
Zanhua toasted me as well. She spoke of the visit I had first made in 2009 when, she said, I had promised her I would bring back her daughter. I couldn't remember making any such promise, but I drank to it anyway.
I remembered that the first day we'd arrived, Zanhua had flinched when Marsha tried to hug her. But now the women had a long embrace, celebrating their collaborative motherhood. And I thought I detected a tear in Zanhua's eye at saying goodbye again to her daughter.
This is an edited extract from Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick, published on 5 June by Granta Books at £20. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.