Author: Barbara Demick
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult nonfiction
Pages: 352 pages including notes and index
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA, China
Summary: On a warm day in September 2000, a woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut behind her brother’s home in China’s Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her family but also not her first children. Living under the shadow of China’s notorious one-child policy, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar. But, in 2002, Fangfang was violently snatched away. The family worried they would never see her again, but they didn’t imagine she could be sent as far as the United States. She might as well have been sent to another world.
Following stories she wrote as the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Barbara Demick embarks on a journey that encompasses the origins, shocking cruelty, and long-term impact of China’s one-child rule; the rise of international adoption and the religious currents that buoyed it; and the exceedingly rare phenomenon of twin separation. Today, Esther—formerly Fangfang—lives in Texas, and Demick brings to vivid life the Christian family that felt called to adopt her, unaware that she had been kidnapped. Through Demick’s indefatigable reporting, will the long-lost sisters finally reunite—and will they feel whole again?
Review: Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy (link is to my review) is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction reads. Demick is so good at a story well told. I convinced my virtual book group to read this, and I am glad that I did.
Demick does a great job of combining history, journalistic research, and personal stories to give the reader the background information and data necessary to understand complex issues such as China's one-child policy. As she describes the content, she pulls us in with individual people, their daily lives, and how the policy affected them.
In the US, we were led to believe that the Chinese were "them," that they abandoned their baby girls so they could have boys, that baby girls were killed by parents in favor of sons. Sure, some of that may have happened, but certainly not on the scale that Americans were told. Demonizing the other is something America is (shamefully) very good at. In reality, some families did have multiple children, some gave the girls up for adoption (and with identifying information so that they could connect later in life), and, as this book describes, a significant percentage had their children stolen/abducted from them. All of this led to the mass American adoption of Chinese babies.
I spent quite a bit of my reading time with tears in my eyes. I cannot imagine losing my daughter, thinking someone harvested her organs, not knowing where she was. And to be reunited with her, to see she is thriving, to touch her, is so much. Many of these families searched for decades. I would also think that would be wonderful for the adoptees to hear. To know they were loved and wanted.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Alphabet (Author)--D
- Cover Lover--Subtitle
- Immigration--China to the US
- Literary Escapes--China
- Nonfiction--Lost or Found
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