Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
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3.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned.
Their understanding had been that China's brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents. What they didn't know - and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing - was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin.
Under China's one-child policy hundreds of poor Chinese were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was sky-rocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages, who were selling them abroad.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grovetells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick's role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China's history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact and consequences of China's one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.
Barbara Demick won the Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award with for Nothing to Envy, her seminal book on North Korea. Besieged, her account of the war in Sarajevo, was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. Demick's Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Demick is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. She lives in New York.
‘Lucid and poignant...beautifully written.’ Literary Review on Eat the Buddha
‘A vivid, exhaustively researched, and ground-level view of the impact of history on people's lives... Compelling.’ New Statesman on Eat the Buddha
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A family torn apart struggles to heal itself in this immersive, painterly exposé. Journalist Demick (Eat the Buddha) recaps the story of Zeng Fangfang and Zeng Shuangjie, twin sisters born in China. In 2002, two-year-old Fangfang was kidnapped, sent to an orphanage, and adopted by an American couple who were told she'd been abandoned. The Zeng family's efforts to reconnect years later frame Demick's investigation into how China's "one child policy" dovetailed with an "insatiable demand" for international adoptees in America. Since 1979, the one child policy had been enforced with extraordinary harshness—parents incurred crippling fines, confiscation of property, and compulsory sterilization, leading babies, especially girls, to be abandoned en masse. Many went uncared for and perished, fueling rhetoric in America, particularly among evangelical Christians, about an "orphan crisis" abroad. Once China opened up to international adoption in the late 1990s, however, the dynamic switched—instead of too many babies, orphanages didn't have enough: when the Zeng family was struggling to pay fines for the twins, China's already ruthless Family Planning agency, now corrupted by "market forces," snatched Fangfang and sold her to an orphanage for a kickback. Demick relays this nightmarish tale in elegant, empathetic prose. It's a tour de force.
