In 2001, Marsha and Al began a second adoption. When Al accepted a lucrative job offer in Atlanta, they swapped roles: He returned to work while Marsha took early retirement. They sold their Texas house at a profit, funding the move to a three-bedroom Atlanta condo and covering the $25,000 adoption fees.

Late in 2002, their referral arrived for a girl supposedly named Shao Fuquan, born June 8, 2000, who had reportedly been found abandoned at the gate of a bamboo craft factory in Shaoyang City on June 4, 2002. The accompanying photo showed a toddler with a dejected expression. Though Marsha was initially unsettled that this child was older than Victoria had been, she accepted the referral, feeling compassion and confidence that she could make the girl happy. They decided to name her Esther, after Marsha’s mother and the biblical queen.

Shortly before Christmas 2002, Marsha, Al, and four-year-old Victoria flew to the city of Changsha. In a hotel conference room rented for the purpose, Esther walked in on her own, unlike every other infant who was being carried, holding a photo cube that Marsha had mailed ahead. A nanny placed Esther on Marsha’s lap; she was obedient but showed no warmth. When Marsha transferred her to Victoria’s lap, Esther broke into loud cries. From that point forward, Esther refused to let Marsha hold her, allowing only Al to lift her. When Marsha told her in halting Chinese that she was her mother, Esther shook her head no. Only at night did Esther tolerate her new mother, curling up beside her like a cat. Al quietly remarked that Esther seemed to have been raised by another family.

Soon, however, Esther and Victoria were inseparable. Back in Atlanta, Esther’s wariness of Marsha also dissolved; she followed her mother everywhere. The family moved to Texas in 2003 to be closer to relatives, and Marsha began homeschooling both girls.

Marsha channeled her energy into advocacy. In 2004, she, Sam, and Sam’s then-wife established the nonprofit Adopt the World, with Marsha as its driving force. In 2006, she self-published a book about an adoptive family. She spoke at churches and civic groups across Texas and Michigan, urging Christians to adopt. She raised about $4,000 for other families wanting to adopt. Demick situates this within the evangelical Christian adoption movement of the early 2000s, supported by figures like megachurch pastor Rick Warren and the Christian Alliance for Orphans, which framed adoption as a spiritual mandate to rescue an “orphan crisis” affecting tens of millions of children worldwide (145). Critics later documented that the movement’s demand swept up children in disaster zones who were not actually orphans.

Then adversity struck. In 2007, Sam’s marriage ended, complicating the nonprofit. Al was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the resulting medical bills eroded the family’s finances. They moved to a smaller house near his chemotherapy hospital. Al died in October 2008, leaving Marsha a single mother for the second time. Her daughters became sullen and withdrawn. A counselor suggested that their grief was compounded by their adoption histories. Shortly afterward, Marsha’s mother began showing signs of dementia. The following year, revelations about corruption within Chinese adoption would shake the very foundations of what Marsha believed she had been doing.

One evening in September 2009, Marsha received an email from Moya Smith, the administrator of a Shaoyang adoptees’ group on Yahoo. Smith forwarded a link to a Los Angeles Times article about babies confiscated under China’s family-planning enforcement. A short sidebar described a missing twin who had a distinctive bump on her left earlobe. Smith asked whether Esther could be that twin.

Marsha pulled out Esther’s adoption certificate, which stated that the girl had been found abandoned at the Qiaotou Bamboo Craft Plant on June 4, 2002. Reading the article, she noted that the twin had been forcibly taken from her uncle’s home on May 30, 2002, just five days before Esther’s supposed abandonment, and that the photograph of the surviving twin in China bore a striking resemblance to Esther. The conclusion was unavoidable: Esther’s abandonment story was fabricated. Overwhelmed by fear, guilt, and grief for both the birth mother and her own daughter, Marsha called Sam and ordered the Adopt the World website taken down, fearing public pressure to return Esther to China. She vowed to tell no one outside the immediate family.

Her secrecy unraveled within days. Nine-year-old Esther borrowed Marsha’s phone and saw a text from Sam’s now-wife Carrie lamenting the separation of twins. Esther showed it to Victoria. Both girls noticed their mother’s unusual agitation, hushed phone calls that stopped when they entered the room, and one strange moment when Marsha wordlessly photographed the small bump on Esther’s left ear. Marsha eventually summoned the girls to her bedroom and began a roundabout explanation of the Chinese adoption scandal. Esther interrupted to ask if she was the twin. Marsha deflected, urging the girls to put it out of their minds.

Weeks later, while Marsha napped, Esther opened her laptop, found the article and the email exchange. Feeling guilty for snooping, Esther confessed to her mother that she knew that she was the missing twin. Her first fear was immediate and concrete: Would she have to go back to China? Marsha assured her that no one could take her away. The family installed a high privacy fence, kept the curtains drawn, and Victoria began calling her sister only “E” in public.

Having left China at about two and a half, Esther had no conscious memory of her early life there, but she felt a pull toward her origins that Victoria did not share. She developed a passion for spicy food and taught herself to cook Chinese dishes. In her teens, she became more aware of her Asian identity, took up photography, and discovered Asian fashion. At 16, she told Marsha she wanted to find her twin. Marsha asked Sam to reach out to the journalist who wrote the original article.

In January 2017, Demick, now in New York, received a Facebook message from Sam Belanger. It had been eight years since Demick’s reporting identified Esther as the missing twin. Sam explained that his family was finally ready to seek contact with Esther’s twin in China and asked for guidance.

When the two spoke by phone, Sam described the family’s shame at having unwittingly participated in a corrupt system. Adopt the World had disbanded. Sam had shifted his focus to advising families about domestic foster-care adoption, and he and Carrie had adopted a Black boy in 2015.

Demick traces the history of adoption secrecy in the United States and the movement against it. For most of the 20th century, adoption records were sealed, adoptees were often not told the truth about their origins, and their sense of loss went unacknowledged. In 1971, adoptee Florence Fisher founded the Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association to fight sealed records, eventually chronicling her 20-year search for her birth parents in a 1973 bestseller. More recently, expanded DNA testing and changing laws have made it harder to keep adoption histories secret, though only 14 states allow adoptees unrestricted access to their original birth certificates.

Nearly four months after Sam’s first contact, Marsha emailed Demick. 16-year-old Esther had already completed her homeschool coursework, obtained a business license for a photography agency, and was shooting weddings. Marsha considered her mature enough for what lay ahead. Demick agreed to help as a personal favor rather than a journalistic assignment.

Demick located Shuangjie through filmmakers working on what would become the 2019 documentary One Child Nation. Shuangjie had moved to Changsha for a kindergarten internship and had a WeChat account. Demick contacted her through a Beijing colleague.

Esther wrote a handwritten letter introducing herself, mentioning her photography business, her love of cooking and fashion, and—carefully—her happiness with her American family. Demick scanned and translated it, sending it to Shuangjie via WeChat. Shuangjie responded within minutes, asking for photos. Demick steered her toward writing a letter in reply instead; Shuangjie obliged, assuring Esther that her family would not try to take her away and expressing her wish to wear matching clothes and go shopping together.

The twins exchanged letters and photos through Demick as courier and translator. They found small points of commonality but were constrained by language, culture, and Esther’s caution about revealing her identity. Demick eventually persuaded Esther to open her own WeChat account. Planning a trip to China, Demick proposed an interpreted video call; both twins immediately agreed.

In August 2017, Demick flew to Changsha, a megacity of ten million people, and the capital of Hunan Province, for the video call. After a slow, sweltering commute from the airport, she and her Beijing colleague Nicole convened at a high-end hotel chosen for its Wi-Fi. Shuangjie arrived with her friend Yaodi for moral support, visibly nervous despite the confident tone of her letter.

With Yaodi holding the smartphone and Nicole interpreting, the WeChat video call connected. The twins stared at each other in silence until Shuangjie broke it with “I’m so happy I can finally see you” (170). Esther managed some small talk and questions. Both sisters, overwhelmed, needed prompting—Shuangjie from Nicole, and Esther from Marsha, who coached off-screen. They discovered they both played guitar and compared physical features, but they stumbled over cultural differences when converting birthdays between lunar and Gregorian calendars and reconciling pounds with kilograms.

Shuangjie opened Esther’s gifts on camera, accommodating Western custom, and pulled out a white blouse, making a self-deprecating comment about her weight. She reciprocated with a clay figure of Dory from Finding Nemo that she had sculpted in school. After about an hour, Demick and her group left for dinner at a nearby Muslim noodle shop, where the atmosphere relaxed considerably.

Over dinner, Yaodi revealed that her name translated to “want little brother” (173), a name her grandfather gave her, illustrating the casual discrimination faced by rural Chinese girls. She also noted that because Esther was born minutes before Shuangjie, Esther was technically the older sister, meaning Shuangjie would be expected to address her as jiejie. Shuangjie told the table she had no interest in marrying young like her already-married older sisters; she wanted her freedom and would like to travel.

After dinner the group returned to the hotel for another brief video chat session, then wrapped up. Before parting, Demick collected a DNA cheek swab from Shuangjie. Nervous about taking a late taxi, Shuangjie and Yaodi accepted an escort back to their dormitory, though Shuangjie refused to let the group walk down the alley to the building itself, not wanting classmates to see the fuss.

The morning after the video call, Demick and Nicole hired a driver and headed to Gaofeng village to collect a parental signature for the DNA test and to speak with the Zeng family. The drive out of Changsha, past the Xiang River and into the mountain countryside, highlighted how much had changed since Demick’s 2009 visit: Roads were paved and the Zeng family home had grown from a log cabin with a tarpaulin roof into an unfinished but substantial two-story brick house with balconies overlooking the rice paddies.

Youdong greeted them in a clean polo shirt. Zanhua was away working at a noodle restaurant in southern China. Youdong was soft-spoken and deliberate. He told Demick he bore no resentment for the delay in learning about Esther’s whereabouts. He had known nothing of international adoption and had assumed his daughter was sold to a family somewhere within China; only in 2009, when he saw her in the spreadsheet Demick sent, did he understand she was abroad. He stated that he did not share the cultural preference for sons over daughters, adding that it was his wife who felt greater social pressure to produce a boy. When Demick opened her laptop to show him photos of Esther, elegantly posed in a lacy green dress, Youdong could not look away. He emphasized that Esther should not be afraid: He understood she was American and would not return to live in China, and simply seeing her made him happy. He signed the DNA consent form.

Demick and Nicole then visited Guoxiong and his wife, Xiuhua, at the neighboring village where the twins were born and where Esther spent her first two years. Xiuhua, a tall, no-nonsense woman, wept when she saw the photographs. She and her elder son, Yuan Zan, reenacted the day Family Planning officials raided their home and forcibly took the baby while the boys tried to hide her.

Later, midwife Li Guihua, who had delivered both twins in the bamboo grove, stopped by. Outspoken and pragmatic, she said Esther was probably better off in America and implied the girl might eventually help her birth family financially. Demick noted Li’s large house and suspected, as Youdong did, that the midwife may have informed Family Planning about the birth. As Demick’s group prepared to leave, elderly villagers gathered and crowded around her phone to see the American daughter. Two of them argued over whether the image on screen was Shuangjie in makeup or the long-lost Fangfang. Their certainty confirmed what the DNA would soon make official.

Returning from China, Demick sent Shuangjie’s DNA samples to a laboratory in Fort Worth. The results arrived within a week: The probability that the two girls were identical twins was 99.9999%. Demick forwarded the findings to everyone involved; the family reacted with quiet acceptance rather than surprise. Marsha had never doubted it.

In February 2018, Demick traveled to Waco, Texas, to give a talk and made a detour to visit the family in person for the first time. Their modest single-story manufactured home sat in a rural stretch west of Fort Worth, concealed behind a high wooden privacy fence that slid open by remote. Marsha, red-haired and quick-talking, greeted Demick at the door. Esther, 17, had been watching the arrival from behind the drapes.

The resemblance to Shuangjie was unmistakable when Esther smiled, though her features were softer. Marsha talked at length, processing the complicated emotions she had been carrying since 2009. She said that while Esther had been the light of her life, she would not have adopted her if she had known the truth. She also questioned her choice to homeschool both daughters. Victoria was gifted in math, Esther was drawn to the arts, and both were eager readers, but neither had enrolled in college, and both were working part-time at a supermarket.

The home was small and warm, filled with books, photos of the girls at every age, and mementos of their late father. A yellow MG sports car sat covered in the yard; the daughters refused to sell it because it reminded them of Al. Victoria, 19, said she’d had a fairy-tale childhood. The family watched home videos of the girls twirling in matching Disney T-shirts and dancing in frilly gowns. Though biologically unrelated, Victoria and Esther were “virtual twins” (190)—a psychological term for siblings especially close in age and relationship.

Esther was quiet but intensely curious. She asked Demick for every detail: how old she’d been when she was taken, what the family said about her as a child. When Demick relayed Xiuhua’s memory of Esther’s precociously early speech, Esther was frustrated that she could not remember a single word of Chinese. Demick explains the psychological concept of infantile amnesia, noting that memories from before roughly age three are irretrievable; Esther was about two and a half when she left China. Demick’s most powerful offering was a photograph of Youdong seated at his kitchen table, staring at a photo of Esther.

During Demick’s visit to Texas, Esther decided to go to China. Marsha, Victoria, and Sam all decided to come. The family had no current passports, no contacts in China, and no Chinese language skills; every logistical detail of the trip would fall to Demick. Because the trip would be expensive and their budget was tight, they reached an agreement: If the family allowed Demick to write their story, she would help cover transport and interpreting costs. Everyone agreed the reunion had to be private, not a staged television spectacle.

Scheduling proved complicated. Harvest season kept the Zengs occupied in autumn, and family members were dispersed across different provinces for work. The solution was obvious to anyone who knew China: The Lunar New Year festival was the one moment when factories, schools, and offices closed and rural migrant workers returned home. Traveling during the holiday would also make the American visitors less conspicuous at a time when security agencies operated with reduced staffing and millions of people were on the move.

The political sensitivity of the trip was real. The subject of children confiscated under the one-child policy remained off-limits in China; the officials responsible for taking Esther still held local government positions. Old Yuan, the teacher who had filed the original petitions about the confiscated children, warned Demick he was still under surveillance. Marsha was also wary after reading about Christian church demolitions and arrests of unregistered congregants. Esther had her own fear: A clip from an upcoming documentary showed a teenage Shuangjie tearfully imagining her twin moving back to China to attend the same school and wear the same clothes. A message from one of her Chinese sisters addressing her as “Fangfang” deepened her anxiety about being drawn into obligations she could not escape.

In 2018, Demick returned to Hunan Province. She met Shuangjie for dinner and facilitated a second video call between the now-18-year-old twins. The conversation was warmer than the first but exposed the widening cultural gulf: Esther described a summer farm program as a fun memory; Shuangjie explained that she’d grown up on a real farm doing actual labor. When Esther mentioned her favorite pastel colors and her painted bathroom, Demick inwardly noted that Shuangjie had never had her own bathroom. Demick also visited the village, where the Zeng family enthusiastically endorsed a New Year reunion.

All remaining pieces fell into place: passports, visas, inexpensive flights to Changsha via Shanghai, and a departure date in February 2019, the Year of the Pig. The chapter closes with a sobering reflection: By December of that same year, a novel respiratory virus would already be spreading from Wuhan, 200 miles away. A visit delayed much longer would almost certainly never have happened.