Fangfang and Shuangjie

choi

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, The Children Who Went way; How China's restrictive birth policies and a Western demand for adoptions split up families. Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2025, at page C7
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... torn-apart-fd4902bf
(book review on Barbara Demick, Daughters of Bamboo Groves; From China to America, a true story of abduction, adoption, and separated twins. Ramdon House, May 19, 2025)

Note: The entire Web has only this summary of the English book) in Chinese (from Taiwan).  

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove. 誠品 Eslite, undated.
https://www.eslite.com/product/1 ... mbRc8KRt88gk0RWdJth
There is no book review in Chinese, or news story in Chinese. While Fangfang and Shuangjie are probably 芳芳 and 雙潔, their birth mother Zanhua is likely not 詹華, because her sister's name is Xiuhua. Besides Zanhua's husband is Youdong. which suggests 佑東 to me.Thus, Zanhua, Xiuhua andYoudong are given names, in my view.
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“You’re not allowed to keep this child,” a Family Planning official informed Xiuhua. Another man held her wailing 21-month-old niece, Fangfang, the toddler reaching out for the only mother she had ever known. The group of men had caught Xiuhua off-guard moments earlier when they burst into the house and restrained her while they grabbed Fangfang. A group of neighbors heard the commotion and came running, attempting to assist Xiuhua as she pursued the departing officials, but they couldn’t keep up with the car driving away from the village. On that steamy early spring day in 2002, Fangfang disappeared into China’s indomitable child-welfare system.

Xiuhua had understood the risk of taking in her niece: Fangfang and her twin sister, Shuangjie, had been born in violation of China’s family-planning policy, often called the one-child policy. Their parents, Zanhua and Youdong, were farmers who already had two daughters and couldn’t afford the fine that another child—let alone two—would incur. Zanhua had given birth to the twins in secret, then placed Fangfang with her brother and his wife to raise as their own. Shuangjie moved with her parents to Chongqing, where they worked as migrant laborers to save money for the exorbitant fines they anticipated. One day, if they earned enough, Zanhua and Youdong hoped to pay the fines, register the girls’ births and reunite their family. But before that day arrived, the local Family Planning office had discovered the ruse and seized Fangfang.

Family Planning cadres were not, officially, supposed to take children from their homes as punishment for policy violations. By the early 2000s, however, a thriving overseas adoption industry had become a byproduct of China’s planned-birth regime, which the government had created in the late 1970s to help slow population growth while the country focused on economic development. A longstanding preference for sons over daughters led hundreds of thousands of families to abandon female children rather than risk fines or even violence at the hands of powerful Family Planning officials. Orphanages grew crowded, so in 1991 the government passed a new law permitting foreign adoption and watched the program take off.

Barbara Demick movingly traces this history of overseas Chinese adoptions and their ripple effects on both sides of the Pacific in “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.” Other authors have written about the one-child policy, or the experience of adopting a Chinese daughter; Ms. Demick’s skill shines through in her synthesis of the two stories.

Throughout the 1990s, foreign parents flocked to China, handing over cash “donations” of $3,000 to $5,000 to the orphanages that housed their new daughters. The money served as a powerful incentive to keep the number of adoptions high, Ms. Demick notes, “but just when it seemed the supply of abandoned baby girls was inexhaustible, it wasn’t.” Demographic changes and economic growth meant people were having fewer children and could more readily afford excess-birth fines. Both human-trafficking networks and Family Planning officials stepped in to ensure that the country could meet the foreign demand for Chinese daughters, kidnapping children and delivering them to orphanages.

“To make the babies legally adoptable,” Ms. Demick explains, “they had to be transformed into orphans.” Bureaucrats fabricated new backstories for the girls. They satisfied a legal requirement that the government search for the children’s birth families by publishing tiny “Seeking Family” notices in obscure newspapers with small circulations. Parents such as Zanhua and Youdong, who had basic educations but few resources, had almost no chance of finding the babies taken from them.

Fangfang spent six months in an orphanage before a Christian couple from Texas arrived to adopt her. Renamed Esther, she flew to the U.S. with her new parents and older sister (also a Chinese adoptee) and started a new life, unaware of the couple from Hunan province that desperately hoped to get her back one day.

Rumors and scattered reports of government baby-trafficking circulated in Chinese media in the early 2000s, when Ms. Demick was the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. In pursuing one of these leads she met Zanhua and wrote an article about then 9-year-old Shuangjie’s disappeared twin sister. The article attracted attention among communities of adoptive parents in the U.S. who were struggling with the implications of their own adoptions: “the possibility that their children had been kidnapped felt like a question mark over their moral right to custody.” Although the vast majority—perhaps 90%—of the girls had been abandoned, articles such as Ms. Demick’s forced adoptive parents to confront uncomfortable questions about the birth families left behind in China.

The story of Shuangjie’s missing twin intrigued Ms. Demick, who knew enough details about Fangfang’s kidnapping to embark on a search. She found an article written by Marsha, Esther’s mother, and soon Ms. Demick faced her own moral quandary: Should she inform Zanhua and Youdong that she had located their long-lost Fangfang? Should she tell Marsha that Esther had been kidnapped, not abandoned? “I had heedlessly barreled ahead,” Ms. Demick admits, “without giving enough thought to the next step or the implications for very real people.” She attempted to make contact with Marsha and her family, who rebuffed Ms. Demick’s advances.

Years passed. Ms. Demick moved to New York, where she was living in early 2017 when a Facebook message arrived from Esther’s adoptive brother. Marsha was ready to talk, and Esther wanted to get in touch with the sister she had lost.

Slowly, Ms. Demick became the go-between who connected Esther and Shuangjie as they hesitantly exchanged messages and then broached the possibility of meeting face-to-face. The second half of “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove” recounts the remarkable story of the twins’ reunion, made possible by the presence of an interpreter but awkward by the girls’ long separation. Ms. Demick accompanied Esther and her American family to the village where she was born, watching as Esther navigated the complicated experience of meeting her birth family and considered the course her life might have taken if the kidnapping had not occurred.

In the face of a looming demographic crisis, the Chinese government ended its family-planning policies in January 2016, then closed the country to foreign adoptions in 2024. During the three decades when adoptions were permitted, more than 160,000 children were taken overseas. For years, it seemed that their previous lives and families in China were completely shut off from them, with no original records of their births or verifiable accounts of how they came to the orphanages. “There was a finality to these adoptions unlike almost any others in the world,” Ms. Demick says. That is no longer the case. The availability of inexpensive commercial DNA services has enabled reunions of birth parents and their children and connected separated siblings. As Esther and Shuangjie, Marsha, Zanhua and Youdong know, these stories are anything but final.

Ms. Cunningham is a historian and writer in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a co-author of the third edition of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.”
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