Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption and Separated Twins

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. (May)