Daughters of the Bamboo Grove (2025) is a work of narrative nonfiction by journalist Barbara Demick. The book chronicles the true story of identical twin sisters separated in infancy as the result of China’s one-child policy. After family-planning officials confiscated one of the twins, she was adopted by a family in Texas, while her sister remained with their birth family in rural Hunan Province. The narrative follows Demick’s investigation into their case and her role in eventually reuniting the sisters 18 years later. The book explores the history of Transforming Orphans Into Commodities, Chinese Grassroots Resistance to Authoritarianism, and the sisters’ experience of Twinship, Identity, and Belonging.

Barbara Demick is an acclaimed author and former foreign correspondent who served as the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. Her work often focuses on giving voice to ordinary people living in repressive societies, a style exemplified in her previous award-winning book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009). That book was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the United Kingdom’s Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is set against the backdrop of China’s international adoption program, which began in the early 1990s and peaked in the mid-2000s before declining amid scandals involving child trafficking and official corruption. The program formally ended in 2024, closing a chapter that saw more than 160,000 Chinese children adopted abroad.

This guide refers to the 2025 Random House edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, pregnancy termination, suicidal ideation, and death by suicide.

Summary

In January 2017, journalist Barbara Demick received an unexpected Facebook message from Sam Belanger, whose mother had adopted a Chinese girl who appeared to have a twin sister still in China. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove traces the intertwined fates of identical twin sisters separated by China’s one-child policy, one raised in rural Hunan Province and the other adopted by an American family in Texas.

The story begins on September 9, 2000, when Yuan Zanhua, a 28-year-old woman in a remote Hunan mountain village, went into labor. Zanhua and her husband, Zeng Youdong, already had two daughters; however, Zanhua had gotten pregnant under pressure from Youdong’s father to produce a male heir. Zanhua concealed her pregnancy to avoid punishment under China’s one-child policy, enacted in 1979 to limit most families to one child and enforced through fines, property destruction, forced abortions, and sterilization. They’d already been fined and had their house vandalized after the birth of their second child. Zanhua hid in a shed in a bamboo grove to give birth secretly. The midwife delivered a girl, then a second: Zanhua had unexpected twins.

The family devised a plan to hide the twins by separating them. The larger firstborn, distinguished by a bump on her left earlobe, was named Fangfang and left with Zanhua’s brother Yuan Guoxiong and his wife, Xiuhua, who desperately wanted a daughter. Her smaller sister, Shuangjie, accompanied the parents to the city of Chongqing, where Youdong worked as a porter. Fangfang thrived, walking by her first birthday and displaying remarkable intelligence.

In spring 2002, Family Planning officials began targeting Fangfang. On May 30, they came in force, held down Xiuhua, pried the screaming child’s hands from Xiuhua’s clothes, and carried Fangfang away. The family was told they must pay 15,000 yuan, roughly $2,000, to recover her, a sum far beyond their means. Youdong felt powerless with no connections, no legal knowledge, and no understanding of where Fangfang had been taken.

Other families whose children had been confiscated organized under Yang Libing, a farmer whose nine-month-old daughter was seized. Despite beatings and a trumped-up arrest, Yang Libing formed the Child Search Association and drafted a petition detailing 16 cases. None of the parents knew where the children had been taken.

A separate scandal exposed the commercial forces behind these confiscations. In 2005, police intercepted a minibus carrying 12 babies in cardboard boxes, revealing a trafficking ring that supplied babies to orphanages participating in China’s international adoption program. Since 1991, the program had made China the largest source of children adopted overseas, with each adoption bringing a mandatory $3,000 bribe to the orphanage. By the early 2000s, both the trafficking ring and the confiscations were driven by the same incentive: international demand for adoptable babies, fueled by cash.

To make confiscated children legally adoptable, orphanages fabricated their histories to categorize them as abandoned. Fangfang was listed as “Shao Fuquan, female, picked up in Shaoyang City, Bamboo Arts Factory, main gate. June 4, 2002” (85), five days after she was seized from her uncle’s house.

Demick, based in Beijing, investigated this corruption with the help of Brian Stuy, an adoptive father from Utah whose research site, Research-China.org, demonstrated through data analysis that orphanages routinely lied about children’s origins. In 2009, Demick traveled to Hunan Province and met Zanhua and nine-year-old Shuangjie. Shuangjie wanted her twin back; Zanhua did not know if her daughter still existed. Demick resolved to find the missing twin.

Using adoption forums and distinguishing details of Fangfang’s case, Demick identified the child as Esther Frederick, adopted in December 2002 by Marsha and Al Frederick, devout Christians from rural Texas. Youdong immediately identified his daughter from a photo lineup. Demick’s September 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times exposed the corruption, upending the assumption that all Chinese adoptees had been willingly abandoned. In 2011, authorities in the city of Shaoyang acknowledged that 14 children had been taken; officials were expelled from the Communist Party, but no one went to prison.

In Texas, Marsha read Demick’s article and realized everything she had been told about Esther’s origins was fabricated. Marsha’s path to adoption had begun with media reports about orphaned and abandoned children overseas. She and Al adopted Esther’s sister, Victoria, from Jiangxi Province in 1999 and then adopted Esther three years later, despite already having five adult children from previous marriages and serious health challenges including Marsha’s multiple sclerosis and Al’s history of heart attacks. After Al’s death from lymphoma in 2008, Marsha became a single mother. Nine-year-old Esther discovered the truth about her origins by reading her mother’s email. Frightened about Esther being sent back to China, the family retreated into insularity.

By 2017, Esther, now 16 and a talented photographer, asked Marsha to help contact her twin. Esther’s much older half-brother Sam reached out to Demick, who located Shuangjie in the city of Changsha, working as a kindergarten teaching intern. The twins became pen pals, with Demick translating. In August 2017, Demick facilitated their first video call. DNA testing confirmed they were identical.

In February 2019, Demick organized a reunion trip during the Lunar New Year holiday. When the twins first met, they stood side by side but did not embrace. However, over several days, the families exchanged gratitude, toured the ancestral shrine, and visited the uncle’s house, where Xiuhua tearfully reenacted the abduction. Growing closer in Changsha, the twins played games, did each other’s makeup, and discovered shared traits. On the final night, they huddled on a window ledge, heads on each other’s shoulders.

Demick reflects on the nature-versus-nurture questions the twins raise, noting that identical twins raised apart are highly valued in human development research, although this work is shadowed by the history of racism, eugenics, and other unsavory historical elements.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, US-China relations deteriorated, and contact between the twins grew intermittent. In September 2024, China formally ended its international adoption program. The same Family Planning officers who once forced sterilizations now offer incentives to encourage births, but the demographic damage is irreversible: China’s population is projected to fall below 800 million by 2100.

The twins’ lives continue to diverge and converge. Esther’s wedding photography career has flourished; in 2022, she married, introducing her husband to her birth family by video. Shuangjie cycled through teaching jobs, eventually settling in Hubei Province with her sister Yan. DNA testing and social media have enabled hundreds of adoptees to locate birth families, though not all wish to be found.