Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

In September 2000, 28-year-old Yuan Zanhua went into labor at her oldest brother's house in a remote village in Hunan Province, central China. She and her mother hurried to a shed hidden in a bamboo grove, a spot the family had secretly prepared for childbirth. Zanhua had to deliver in hiding because she was violating China's one-child policy, the law enacted in 1979 that limited most families to a single child. A midwife delivered a girl of about five pounds. Before Zanhua could recover, the midwife noticed a second baby emerging: Zanhua was having twins.

Journalist Barbara Demick, a former Los Angeles Times China correspondent, narrates the story as it unfolded for her over 15 years of reporting. She dedicates the book to the approximately 160,000 Chinese children adopted internationally, hoping to help them understand their origins.

Demick traces the one-child policy's origins and the world that shaped Zanhua. After Mao Zedong's era of famine and political upheaval, his successor Deng Xiaoping imposed birth limits in 1979 to boost per-capita income. An agency known as Family Planning enforced the law through forced abortions, compulsory sterilizations, demolition of homes, and crippling fines. By the 1990s, an estimated 83 million Chinese worked for Family Planning. Zanhua grew up in a family of six children, dropped out of school after three years, and left home at 13 to sell bags on the street, joining millions of migrants escaping rural poverty.

Zanhua's husband, Zeng Youdong, was a quiet, literate man from the neighboring mountaintop village of Gaofeng. Their first two daughters were born in 1995 and 1997, each unauthorized birth bringing escalating penalties. Youdong's father pressured them to produce a son, arguing that only a boy could conduct ancestral rites and provide for the family in old age. By 2000, Zanhua was pregnant again, and the couple arranged her secret delivery in the bamboo grove.

Youdong, working in another province when the twins were born, rushed home in excitement; he had always privately preferred daughters. The family devised a plan: One twin, named Fangfang, would live with Zanhua's brother Guoxiong and his wife, Xiuhua. She would be registered under their surname to disguise her origins. The other, Shuangjie, would accompany her parents to Chongqing. At six months the twins were separated. Fangfang thrived with her aunt and uncle, walking by her first birthday.

In early 2002, Family Planning officers targeted the uncle's house. In two earlier raids, Xiuhua's teenage sons escaped through a window clutching the baby. On May 30, 2002, officers stormed the house while Xiuhua was alone with the toddler, pinning her down while Fangfang clutched her aunt's shirt. A man pried the child loose and carried her away. The family tried to negotiate Fangfang's return, but Family Planning demanded the equivalent of five years' rural earnings.

Fangfang was not the only child taken. Across surrounding villages, Family Planning officers confiscated babies from poor families and delivered them to the Shaoyang Social Welfare Institute, a government-run orphanage that erased children's identities through fabricated 'finding ads'—newspaper notices falsely claiming each child had been found abandoned at a public location. Fangfang's ad stated she was found at a bamboo arts factory gate five days after her confiscation. After 60 days without a claim, children were classified as orphans and offered for international adoption. By 2005, nearly 8,000 Chinese babies were adopted annually to the United States alone; orphanages depended on three-thousand-dollar "donations" from adopting families, an incentive that fueled both trafficking and confiscations as fewer families relinquished daughters.

In Texas, a devout Christian named Marsha was moved by stories of abandoned Chinese girls and decided to adopt. She and her husband, Al, adopted a baby girl named Victoria from Jiangxi Province in 1999. In December 2002, they adopted a toddler from the Shaoyang orphanage whom they named Esther. The referral papers described her as abandoned outside a factory. Esther initially refused to let Marsha touch her, accepting only Al, who observed, "It almost seems like she's been raised by another family." Marsha homeschooled the girls in Texas and founded a nonprofit called Adopt the World.

Demick, by then the Los Angeles Times China correspondent in Beijing, grew skeptical that all Chinese adoptees were willingly abandoned. In 2009, she traveled to Hunan and interviewed families whose children had been taken. At a footbridge near the bamboo grove, she met Zanhua and nine-year-old Shuangjie, who said that her twin "would be the same age as me. It would be fun. We could play together." Demick published a front-page story in September 2009 and, using adoption networks, identified Fangfang as Esther by mailing a photo lineup to the village. Youdong immediately pointed to Esther's photos.

Demick contacted the American family, but Al had recently died and the family asked for privacy. That same month, Marsha read the article, checked Esther's documents, and realized the dates matched: Fangfang was taken on May 30, and the orphanage recorded receiving her on June 4. Everything Marsha had been told was a lie. Nine-year-old Esther discovered the truth by reading her mother's text messages and grew afraid she would be sent back to China.

In January 2017, Marsha's adult son Sam Belanger contacted Demick on Facebook: Esther, now 16, wanted to connect with her twin. Demick located Shuangjie, now a teaching intern in Changsha, and served as go-between as the twins exchanged handwritten letters. Esther wrote about her photography business but added, "I am very happy and want you to know that I have a caring and lovely family whom I love dearly." Shuangjie replied: "We won't snatch you away from your family." In August 2017, Demick facilitated a video call. The twins stared at each other across seven thousand miles before Shuangjie broke the silence: "I'm so happy I can finally see you." A DNA test confirmed with 99.9999% probability that they were identical.

In February 2019, Demick brought Esther, Victoria, Marsha, and Sam to China for the Lunar New Year. Shuangjie waited alone on a muddy village road, peered into the van, found Esther, and said softly, "Esta." Over a week of daily visits, the families shared meals and confronted difficult questions. Youdong asked how much Marsha had paid. Marsha delivered the speech she had rehearsed for a decade: "I would never have adopted her if I knew she was stolen from you." Youdong replied, "It was the situation. It was the government." Xiuhua reenacted the abduction; Zanhua led Esther to the bamboo grove where she was born.

In Changsha, the twins spent days playing cards and doing each other's makeup, discovering shared traits: Both could roll their tongues, both loved fruit, and both shared their father's emotional reserve. On the final night, Lantern Festival, they huddled on a window ledge watching rain-blurred fireworks. When Shuangjie departed alone for her dormitory, she told the group, "I want to be brave like Esther."

Plans for a reciprocal visit collapsed when Covid-19 sealed China's borders and strained U.S.-China relations. Both twins moved forward: Esther's photography business flourished, and she married in 2022, introducing her husband to her birth family by video call. Shuangjie found work tutoring calligraphy and honored her vow not to marry young. After China relaxed the policy in 2015, its population nonetheless began declining, and in September 2024 the government formally ended international adoption. The book closes by examining the DNA-testing movement enabling adoptees to locate birth families, while placing the one-child policy alongside the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as what demographer Wang Feng ranks the Communist Party's greatest mistake, whose consequences will reverberate for generations.