DAUGHTERS OF THE BAMBOO GROVE

A reporter aids in the quest to reunite long-separated twins in their native China.

As Demick’s account opens, she has received an unexpected email in which the stepbrother of an adopted Chinese girl tells her that “it appears like she has a twin sister still in China.” Having spent years reporting there for the Los Angeles Times, Demick (author of Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea) delivers a narrative that will trouble many readers, one that begins with the one-child policy initiated by the government in 1979. That policy was deeply unpopular for many reasons, not least that China lacks a social welfare network to support the elderly, leaving it to children to take care of their parents. Popular or no, the law, Demick writes, “was enforced by an agency euphemistically known as the jisheng ban, literally ‘planned birth’ or ‘family planning agency.’” She adds, ominously, “It didn’t actually plan or advise so much as punish,” noting that the agency grew to employ 83 million Chinese and even more informers. In the case of Demick’s chief subjects, a couple in rural Hunan Province, a daughter—their third, and the older of twins by a few minutes—was kidnapped at 22 months and put up for adoption, which brought her to rural Texas. That pattern of kidnapping and child trafficking is endemic: The U.S. State Department reckons that 20,000 children are stolen each year for proceeds that help support an orphanage system whose “funding from national and local government was minimal.” Demick’s account of the twins’ eventual reunion is affecting, as well as a revealing study in cultural differences. And while the one-child system has changed, Demick concludes by noting that there are still up to 120,000 Chinese adoptees “tethered by blood to another family and country they struggle to comprehend.”

Solid reportage and a deep knowledge of China inform this welcome study of a state-imposed social experiment gone awry.