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The Sun
4 days ago
- Health
- The Sun
Twins raised 7,000 miles apart meet 17 YEARS after violent kidnap as harrowing legacy of ‘child snatchers' is laid bare
AS Marsha Frederick put her adopted daughter to bed every night in Texas, she felt peace of mind that she had rescued the toddler from abandonment. But little did she realise, more 7,000 miles and 13 time zones away in rural China, a small girl desperately wondered if her twin was ever coming home 7 7 Shuangjie Zeng had been cruelly separated from her twin Fangfang -renamed Esther - by China's loathed family planning bureaucracy that used inhumane methods to enforce the "one-child" policy. Severe cases saw countless mothers forced to abort their babies, while millions were sterilised. But in an almost unbelievable twist in the twins' story, they were eventually reunited thanks to journalist Barbara Demick, who outlines the extraordinary story in her new book: Daughters of The Bamboo Grove. From 1979 to 2015, untold numbers of Chinese families had to give up their beloved babies - born or unborn - by ruthless enforces. Some corrupt officials even claimed youngsters had been abandoned and sold them through orphanages to American parents - who were none the wiser. One mother who fell victim to the process was Yuan Zanhua. Terrified of the notorious family planners, Yuan - who already had two children - gave birth to identical twin girls with "plump cheeks and button noses" hidden in a bamboo grove in September 2000. But at just 21 months, Esther was with her aunt when men stormed her home and snatched the toddler with no explanation. Intruders held Esther's aunt back as others tore the youngster away as she desperately clung onto the hem of her skirt. The toddler was taken to an orphanage, where she was later adopted by an unsuspecting American couple from Texass in exchange for a sizeable donation. Shocking true story behind Netflix's Into the Fire as mom seeks missing daughter Aundria Bowman 35 years after adoption Back in a poor village in Hunan province, Esther's family spent years wondering if she was even still alive. Then in 2009, Demick interviewed Esther's biological parents and many others for a report for The Los Angeles Times. Against all odds, the writer managed to track down their missing twin an ocean away in the US - but Esther's adoptive family did not want to talk. Grappling with a moral dilemma, Demick decided to let Esther's birth family know she was alive and well - but concealed her exact whereabouts. It wasn't until several years later that the author received a Facebook message that made her bolt upright - Esther's adoptive family were ready to speak. After years of longing for her twin, Shuangjie was able to finally reconnect with Esther, first via message and later by video call. Eventually, after years of sporadic messaging - the sisters were reunited in person in 2019 in an extraordinary twist to their story. Demick told The Sun: "The trip to China was very gratifying. As a journalist and as a person. "I'd first stumbled onto this story in 2009, a full decade before the reunion took place. "Over the years, I'd felt bad that I hadn't been able to tell the Chinese families more about the whereabouts of their missing daughter. "And I knew that my discovery of the kidnapping was initially very painful for Esther and her adoptive family. "The book deals with some of the ethical questions raised by the situation." 7 7 Esther was taken in the midst of China's controversial 36-year "old child" policy - and after Beijing had opened international adoptions in 1992. It fuelled an undercover black market for trafficked children - with Western families believing they were saving youngsters from desertion. That was true in the case of Esther's adoptive parents, Marsha and Al Frederick, who were told the toddler had been found abandoned at the gate of a bamboo factory in Shaoyang City. Demick fears there could be many more stories like Esther and Shuangjie's. "With 160,000 adoptees around the world, statistically speaking, there must be hundreds of separated identical twins," she said. "Usually both were adopted. "I mention some funny stories in the book: a young woman at her freshman orientation for college was approached by a student who said she looked exactly like one of his high school friends. "The friend dismissed it as racism. ("Oh, you know, all Asians look alike," she would remember thinking). They turned out to be identical twins. "Esther and Shuangjie are intriguing because one is American, the other Chinese, and they offer a rare glimpse into the cultural influences that form our identity. "A prominent psychologist once likened identical twins raised apart to the Rosetta Stone, the Egyptian stele that allowed linguists to decipher ancient languages-- though here, it is the eternal question of nature versus nurture. "When I started this project, Esther and Shuangjie was the only case I knew of where one twin remained with the birth family in China and the other was adopted abroad, but recently two others have emerged. China's one child policy CHINA introduced the one-child policy in 1979 as a population control measure to try and slow down the growth of the country. Enforced by the Chinese government, it restricted most couples to having only one child. But rural families and ethnic minorities were often given different rules - such as allowing a second child if the first was a girl. Families that complied were entitled to benefits such as better housing, education, and healthcare - and those who didn't stick to the policy faced fines and job losses. The enforcement of the policy varied across the country and sometimes involved forced abortions and sterilisation. While the policy helped reduce China's population growth, it also led to significant challenges. These included a rapidly ageing population, a shrinking workforce, and a skewed gender ratio due to a preference for boys - resulting in sex-selective abortions and killing of baby girls. In response to the growing problems, the policy was relaxed in 2015, allowing couples to have two children. By 2021, the government eased restrictions even further - allowing three children per family to address demographic imbalances and declining birth rates. "Thanks to the rise of commercial DNA testing and social media, adoptees are finding genetic relatives at a rapid rate. "I'm sure we will hear more about children who were snatched from their birth parents like Esther. As well as more stories of separated twins." International adoptions were banned by China in 2024 - eight years after officially ending its one-child policy due to concerns over its ageing workforce and economic stagnation. It was replaced by a two-child policy, which was then expanded to three-child in 2021. But Demick believes it could be too late to undo the damage inflicted. "Who would believe it? China is running out of people," she added. "Once the most populous country in the world (a title it has recently ceded to India), its 1.4 billion population is expected to drop in half by the end of this century. "There aren't enough of those cheap young workers who transformed China into an industrial powerhouse, staffing the assembly lines that produced our Christmas toys and smartphones. "Apart from the economic fallout of the population drop, there are the social consequences. In some areas, seven boys were born for every five girls, which has created a pool of bachelors unable to find partners. "Sexually frustrated young men are not conducive to social stability. "Rural men, who are less desirable on the marriage market, have had to import brides from Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Nepal, which in turn has led to bride trafficking and kidnapping. "The Chinese government lifted the one-child policy in 2015. "Almost comically, the same cadres who used to force women to have abortions or get sterilised, are now offering rice cookers and water bottles and sometimes cash as incentives for having more children. "But it's hard to reverse course. Those births that didn't take place in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have left China without enough women of child-bearing age to replenish the population." 7
New York Times
24-05-2025
- New York Times
Separated as Toddlers, Raised on Opposite Sides of the World
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.
