Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 20, 2025
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The heartrending story of twin sisters torn apart by China’s one-child policy and the rise of international adoption—from the author of the National Book Award finalist Nothing to Envy, one of today’s leading reporters
“An amazing book. I truly couldn’t put it down.”—Lisa See, New York Times bestselling author of Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
“Barbara Demick turns the seemingly prosaic human dramas of our societies into a cinematic and heart-rending epic tale with consequences that cross continents.”—Emily Feng, author of Let Only Red Flowers Bloom
On a warm day in September 2000, a woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut behind her brother’s home in China’s Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her family but also not her first children. Living under the shadow of China’s notorious one-child policy, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar. But, in 2002, Fangfang was violently snatched away. The family worried they would never see her again, but they didn’t imagine she could be sent as far as the United States. She might as well have been sent to another world.
Following stories she wrote as the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Barbara Demick embarks on a journey that encompasses the origins, shocking cruelty, and long-term impact of China’s one-child rule; the rise of international adoption and the religious currents that buoyed it; and the exceedingly rare phenomenon of twin separation. Today, Esther—formerly Fangfang—lives in Texas, and Demick brings to vivid life the Christian family that felt called to adopt her, unaware that she had been kidnapped. Through Demick’s indefatigable reporting, will the long-lost sisters finally reunite—and will they feel whole again?
A remarkable window into the volatile, constantly changing China of the last half century and the long-reaching legacy of the country’s most infamous law, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is also the moving story of two sisters torn apart by the forces of history and brought together again by their families’ determination and one reporter’s dogged work.
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.
