Daughters Of The Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick: Twins wrenched apart by the Chinese government... with one sold to America

When Zanhua gave birth to twin girls deep in a bamboo grove, out of earshot of prying officials in a remote village in the Chinese province of Hunan in 2000, she and her husband Zeng Youdong knew they’d be in serious trouble if this latest violation of the one-child policy was discovered.

The baby girls, Shuangjie and Fangfang, brought the total of their offspring to four – all of them girls. Zanhua had been praying for a boy to satisfy her parents-in-law, who insisted that a son was necessary to conduct the family’s ritual displays of piety. Instead, here were more girls: adorable, but illegal.

The couple were still working themselves to the bone in a far-away city to raise money to pay the fines (equivalent of a year’s salary) for having their second child. While they were away, officials punched a hole in their roof, as an extra punishment.

They decided not to register the twins’ births. But they’d need to be careful. Spies from Family Planning (the government department as ruthless as the Stasi) were everywhere. Signs were up in towns and villages: ‘If you violate our policy, your family will be destroyed.’ Officials snooped round villages listening out for crying newborns. Youdong took Shuangjie with him to work in the city, and Fangfang was sent to lodge with a loving aunt and uncle.

Reading Barbara Demick’s shocking account of how Fangfang would be brutally abducted by agents of the government, sent to an orphanage and adopted by well-meaning Americans who’d been told she’d been abandoned by her family outside a factory gate, makes one gasp at the cruelty, let alone the economic short-sightedness, of China’s one-child policy, which began in 1979 and officially ended only in 2015.

A government slogan went: ‘After the first child: insert an IUD. After the second: sterilise. After the third: kill, kill, kill!’ Zanhua remembered seeing a pregnant woman being hauled away for a forced abortion, kicking and screaming. No one dared to help her – they’d have been beaten up.

A side effect of this situation was that couples across the Western world who wanted to adopt a baby could now hope to find one in China. Many Chinese parents did abandon their second babies, to avoid the fines and punishments. Orphanages were bursting. There was a huge take-up of adoptions, especially in the USA.

Chinese adoptees were ‘media darlings’. Western families felt virtuous in rescuing the babies, believing they’d been voluntarily abandoned.

Thus it was that an evangelical Christian couple from Texas, Marsha and Al, aged 46 and 54, adopted two Chinese girls: first Victoria, and then, in 2002, another girl aged two-and-a-half, whom they named Esther.

That little girl was Fangfang. The official documentation from the Shaoyang Orphanage said: ‘Found abandoned at the gate of the Qiatou Bamboo Craft Factory… We cannot find her natural parents and other relatives up to now.’

That was a blatant lie. What had really happened was that a group of men burst in to her aunt Xiuhua’s house, held her down as she struggled, screamed and clung to Fangfang, and took the little girl away. They delivered her to the Civil Affairs Office, who took her on to the orphanage to be put up for adoption.

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These were not rogue child traffickers. They were a branch of the Chinese government, fixing problems in the global supply chain. Ten per cent of babies put up for adoption were confiscated in that way. The West was greedy for adoptees, and orphanages relied on the $3,000 in cash that adoptive families paid them for each one.

Esther’s devastated parents were powerless to find her, let alone retrieve her. ‘It was your fault for having too many children,’ the Family Planning office told them. They had no right even to know where she’d been taken. They had no idea she might have gone overseas.

The sleuthing author of this excellent book discovered that those ads put out by Chinese orphanages often lied about the babies’ provenance. Among the dozen Chinese parents she interviewed were Zanhua and Youdong, who, seven years later, had no idea of Fangfang’s whereabouts. In 2009, Demick’s piece for the Los Angeles Times ‘Stolen Chinese babies supply adoption demand’ shocked the West. Lots of her American friends had adopted Chinese babies.

The piece mentioned twins who’d been separated. Marsha received an email from a woman in the adoptees group on Yahoo, who’d read the piece. ‘Could Esther be the missing twin?’ Marsha had a sinking feeling of certainty that she was, as the dates the twin went missing matched up with Esther’s adoption.

Esther, happily living in Texas as an American nine-year-old girl, happened to see a text on her mother’s phone: ‘It’s terrible for twins to be separated.’

She’d noticed her mother had been agitated recently, and thought it weird when her mother had pushed her hair aside and taken a snap of the small bump on her left ear (the other twin had a similar bump).

Eventually Marsha quietly mentioned to Victoria and Esther that a scandal had erupted in China over confiscated babies, and that one of the babies had a twin sister in China who was looking for her. ‘Mum, am I that twin?’ Esther asked.

Appalled that they’d been unwitting participants in a corrupt lie, Marsha and Al became terrified that Esther would be kidnapped and sent back to China. They put a fence round the house, and lived in a state of ‘pervasive, unspoken unease’. It wasn’t until Esther was 17 that she suggested to her mother that they contact her possible lost twin sister.

Thus it was that Demick went to the city of Changsha to meet Shuangjie, and the twins met, first by video call, and then, a few months later, face to face in the village where Fangfang had been born. A DNA check confirmed that it was 99.999 per cent certain that the girls were identical twins.

Demick beautifully describes the initial awkwardness of the two families on meeting each other. Zanhua had made an elaborate lunch, in their freezing, unheated village house. Everyone sat around with their coats on. The first thing Zanhua said to her long-lost daughter was ‘Eat, eat, before it gets cold.’ No one made conversation.

But gradually, over the ten-day stay, they thawed out. Shuangjie braided Esther’s hair, and the twins talked about the clothes and music they loved. When they left, Zanhua and Marsha embraced, ‘celebrating their collaborative motherhood’.

But the fact that the girls didn’t even speak the same language brought home the cultural separation that had been inflicted on them. Demick observes (fascinatingly) that, economically speaking, the Chinese family were becoming better off than the Texas family.

While American families were struggling with mortgages and health-insurance premiums, earnings per capita for the Chinese had gone up tenfold over the last 18 years. The Zeng family owned nearly two acres of farmland, and were building a brick house the size of a small hotel.

‘Esther has been a bright star in my life,’ Marsha said to Zanhua. ‘But I would never have adopted her if I’d known she’d been stolen from you.’