Latest news with #BarbaraDemick
West Australian
05-07-2025
- Business
- West Australian
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: Barbara Demick exposes dark trade behind China's adoptions in new book
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: Barbara Demick exposes dark trade behind China's adoptions in new book
Daily Mail
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews: Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace: Davina's DNA search show's been left behind by the march of science
Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace (ITV1) Science that seemed miraculous a few years ago is now commonplace. We would be disappointed if a complex paternity riddle couldn't be solved with a single DNA swab. Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace is now in its seventh series, helping people abandoned at birth to find out who their real parents were. And even presenters Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall no longer appear surprised when a five-minute genetic test matches an adoptee with blood relatives they've never met. But the possibilities created by global DNA databases are now far more astounding than anything Long Lost Family has shown us so far. Writer Barbara Demick spent years in China reporting on its cruel 'one-child-per-family' policy, which lasted from 1980 to 2015. Parents who dared have a second baby were punished with fines equivalent to several years' income. Officials from the Family Planning department smashed up their homes and confiscated their possessions — often stealing their children, too. Many thousands of Chinese children were adopted by Europeans, Americans and Australians. At that time, it was unimaginable any of them would ever be able to discover their own roots. 'An adoptee finding her birth family seemed no more likely than locating a particular grain of sand,' wrote Demick, whose book Daughters Of The Bamboo Grove was reviewed in the Mail on Sunday last weekend. African dish of the night: Visiting a pizzeria run by an Egyptian father and son, on Tucci In Italy (National Geographic and Disney+), actor Stanley was startled to learn the first pizzas were baked for the Pharaohs. Surely, if that were true, they'd be pyramid-shaped instead of round. Demick interviewed one man, Zhou Changqi from Hunan province, who was desperate for news of the daughter taken from him and his wife in 2001. He'd sacrificed everything in his search, and was now living penniless in a corrugated iron shack. 'I miss my daughter all the time,' he begged. 'I know if she's gone to America, I can't get her back. I'm not trying. I would like to get a picture of her.' Incredibly, in 2022, a DNA ancestry service brought them together. Zhou's daughter, who grew up in middle-class Indiana, took a test for health reasons, checking for genes that indicated a higher risk of cancer. Instead, she found her birth parents. Both stories in the first of the new series of Long Lost Family seemed unremarkable by comparison. A woman named Lisa who was left in another baby's pram in the late 1960s discovered she had three full siblings — all of whom were brought up at home by their parents, both now dead. Fortunately, Lisa enjoyed a happy childhood with her adoptive mum and dad. She must have wondered, though, whether she was any better off for knowing she was the only one of the four to be abandoned. And a man from Neath, 59-year-old Simon, learned that his birth mother was still alive — but that she didn't want to meet him. That, too, was an unrewarding outcome, though he was warmly welcomed by his extended family of cousins.
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
From Barbara Demick to Emily Kasriel: new books reviewed in short
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China's Stolen Children by Barbara Demick China ended international adoption less than a year ago. Today there are around 160,000 internationally adopted Chinese children, the majority of whom are girls. Foreign adoption of Chinese babies was so popular in the 2000s that Mattel partnered with the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, China, creating a set of limited edition white dolls holding an Asian baby. These were given to the families staying at the hotel, meeting their new baby for the first time before taking them home. Well-intentioned adoptive parents believed they were rescuing babies who had been abandoned under China's strict one-child policy. A much darker truth is explored in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove. Drawing on the story of two identical twins separated between China and the US as infants who reconnected in adulthood, and supported by two decades of reporting, Barbara Demick shows that many of these babies were taken from the arms of their parents by government officials and trafficked. With details fudged during the adoption process, and Chinese bureaucracy opaque, many families are still unable to find their lost children. Granta, 336pp, £20. Buy the book By Catharine Hughes Poor Ghost! by Gabriel Flynn Losing a Harvard PhD, a blossoming romance and dreams of literary fame brings Luca's coming-of-age narrative crashing down. Back in a reality that he desperately tried to escape, Luca finds himself in his hometown of Manchester, unemployed and sofa-surfing. He thinks he is above the place of his youth but has little to show for it. The city's grey skies, broken glass and hollow gentrification (its 'artificial smile') are as much of a burden on Luca's supposed destiny as was his father, a troubled academic and alcoholic. His father's substance abuse only worsened after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) when Luca was a child, eventually leading to his dad's suicide. Luca tries to find purpose in Andy, who is looking for a writer to pen his memoir before he too is incapacitated by MS. But this is mainly self-serving; Luca's haughty manuscript and its projections of ruin – his own, his father's, the city's – run counter to Andy's laddish contentedness. Their dynamic is tricky and at times uncomfortable, but it's a more compelling arc than the author's exploration of Luca's romantic fatalism. Reinforced by stinging deployment of similes and metaphors, Poor Ghost! is a solid exploration of trauma, class and people's sense of place – wherever that may be. Sceptre, 272pp, £18.99. Buy the book By Harry Clarke-Ezzidio Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends and Foes by Emily Kasriel We have lost the knack of listening properly, says the academic and author Emily Kasriel, and in a divided world one of the things we are distanced from is our own agenda: what is it we want when we talk to another person? Our ears may be open but our thoughts are not always on what is being said but elsewhere – too often waiting for our own turn to speak. The need to engage properly in these fractious times hardly needs stating, but how to do it is a different matter. Here Kasriel outlines a method to enable deep listening which includes techniques to encourage curiosity about another person's thoughts, to help lose our fear of conversational silences, and for deeper reflection. The very act of listening properly, she says, is a recognition of both respect and empathy. She has used, and taught, this approach in assorted areas of stress – from families to war zones – and reinforces her method with both science and real-world examples, from Nelson Mandela to Antony Gormley. Her tone is equally considered, eschewing the woo-woo for calm and reasoned elucidation. Thorsons, 320pp, £16.99. Buy the book By Michael Prodger The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel, translated by Jamie Bulloch Why do people feel compelled to visit Pompeii? Are we just accumulating experiences like stamp collectors, ticking off the greatest artworks and monuments of antiquity to collect the complete set? Or could Pompeii be about something more, something living, a way for us to see ourselves through the lens of a city buried under volcanic ash and frozen in time nearly 2,000 years ago? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As director-general of the archaeological park in Pompeii, these are not just abstract questions for Gabriel Zuchtriegel. 'Explaining a work of art, an ancient city or an entire culture is like planting a seed,' he writes, urging readers to look beyond temple floor plans or artefact inventories. 'The fertile ground is your audience's capacity to let this seed grow.' Yes, The Buried City is about history: the Romans who lived in Pompeii, how they lived and died, and what archaeological secrets this unique site is still offering up to those willing to keep digging. But it's also about now. Issues of identity, citizenship, community, belonging are explored through rescued artefacts and ruined buildings. This isn't a book about antiquity. It's a book about what our love of antiquity can teach us about ourselves. Hodder & Stoughton, 256pp, £22. Buy the book By Rachel Cunliffe [See also: The ghost of Muriel Spark] Related
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick: Chilling insight into the birth of modern China
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China's Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins Author : Barbara Demick ISBN-13 : 978-1783787227 Publisher : Granta Guideline Price : £20 Early in Barbara Demick's exposé of child trafficking in the adoption markets of early-2000s China , she lists some of the chilling graffiti that appeared in Chinese towns during the height of the enforcement of the one-child policy: 'Better blood flowing like streams than children born outside the state plan.' The policy was ruthlessly enforced by family planning officers, who acted with impunity and sometimes outside the law – particularly in the period this book covers, when China's increasing wealth meant a sudden shortage of excess children, and fewer lucrative overseas adoptions . Demick's illuminating and often heartbreaking exploration of the processes that led to the snatching of Chinese children and the obfuscation of their true origins is well-researched, allowing the reader to share the writer's frustration and awe at the enormity of an operation carried out both by Chinese state employees and human traffickers. In a country as vast as China, with its strict system of censorship, it was only the coming of the social media age that allowed these stories to leak – a book such as this can only scratch the surface of the misery experienced in the poorer provinces. READ MORE We follow Demick as she pieces together the story of the Zeng family, whose twin daughters were separated in their infancy, with daughter Fangfang/Esther snatched by Chinese authorities and later adopted by American parents. Demick, whose own close friend adopted a Chinese baby in the years before these scandals broke, doesn't shy away from the complexity of the issue – should we blame the American parents who were assured that the children they adopted were abandoned by their parents? Should children raised in middle-class, urban America be returned to rural China? There are no easy answers here, but in tracking the tentative steps taken by both the American and Chinese branches of the family to reunite the twins, Demick demonstrates that the pathway towards some kind of resolution is more likely to be brought about by the kindness and empathy of individuals, rather than state action. The stories here will hit close to home for Irish readers as we deal with our own legacies of forced overseas adoptions. A chilling insight into the birth of modern China, and a gripping read.
The Sun
02-06-2025
- 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
