Event Coverage Highlight

By Cathy Manso

Barbara Demick, an award-winning foreign correspondent, spoke about the families and fractured histories at the heart of her latest book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, during an OPC Book Night on Dec. 17 in conversation with Edward Wong, diplomatic correspondent of The New York Times.

Demick described how reporting on Chinese adoption took her far beyond familiar narratives about girls “discarded” under the one-child policy. Her work led her into remote villages in Hunan and Guizhou, where family-planning officials wielded sweeping power and where parents with limited literacy often struggled to push back. “China is a great recycling culture — I found it hard to believe that healthy human babies were discarded, so casually,” she told the audience, describing villages where rags on a clothesline could mark a household with an infant and illiteracy left parents vulnerable to official coercion. She shared photos from these communities and recounted encounters with families living in wooden cabins, some of whom petitioned for answers about children who had disappeared.

At the center of her book is the story of biological twin sisters born in China. Shuangjie grew up in the Chinese countryside and Fangfang, later named Esther by her adoptive family, was abducted, placed in an orphanage, and adopted by a family in Texas. Demick’s reporting eventually linked the two girls. In 2009, after reviewing orphanage files and online postings, she found a likely match, but delayed publishing details out of concern for the child’s safety. She recalled how she first notified the birth family privately, “I didn’t think you could out a 9-year-old as being stolen.”

Demick described the eventual reunion she facilitated as a mix of awkwardness and tenderness: long silences, exchanged photos, and the disorienting experience of meeting someone who was both intimately connected and profoundly unfamiliar.

Wong, who moderated the event, highlighted how Demick’s investigation illuminated systemic incentives that shaped the orphanage network. Adoption fees and international donations often propped up institutions that appeared well-funded to visiting families but operated with limited government support.

Demick also reflected on the broader impact of her reporting, which helped spur a 2009 scandal that led to a sharp decline in international adoptions from China and greater scrutiny of orphanage practices. She noted how policy has since reversed: officials who once enforced strict birth limits now offer incentives to encourage childbirth as China confronts demographic decline. Wong called it, “One of the greatest ironies of contemporary China.”