Review by Booklist Review
Between 1991 and 2024, China's official international adoption program facilitated over 160,000 placements of Chinese infants. Adoptive parents were largely told that their babies, almost exclusively girls, had been abandoned due to ingrained Chinese preferences for sons over daughters, exacerbated by China's "one child policy." In this appalling exposé, longtime China correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and investigative journalist Demick dismisses these erroneous beliefs, painting a picture of traumatized parents at the mercy of rampant corruption perpetuated by Chinese family planning officials who enforced draconian birth-control restrictions. The action centers around twin girls, third and fourth daughters born to farmers, who were separated as toddlers, one raised by her extended family, and the other kidnapped, sent to an orphanage, and eventually adopted by a couple in Texas. While Western agencies and receiving families were ignorant of these wrongdoings, these politically sanctioned kidnappings were heartbreakingly common, especially in tiny mountain communities where vulnerable families were tricked, lied to, and ignored, despite years of desperately trying to find their children. Demick tells their stories with amazing levels of detail, nuance, empathy, and grace. She includes meticulous documentation and offers unique insights into life in rural China from the Maoist regime to the present day.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A family torn apart struggles to heal itself in this immersive, painterly exposé. Journalist Demick (Eat the Buddha) recaps the story of Zeng Fangfang and Zeng Shuangjie, twin sisters born in China. In 2002, two-year-old Fangfang was kidnapped, sent to an orphanage, and adopted by an American couple who were told she'd been abandoned. The Zeng family's efforts to reconnect years later frame Demick's investigation into how China's "one child policy" dovetailed with an "insatiable demand" for international adoptees in America. Since 1979, the one child policy had been enforced with extraordinary harshness--parents incurred crippling fines, confiscation of property, and compulsory sterilization, leading babies, especially girls, to be abandoned en masse. Many went uncared for and perished, fueling rhetoric in America, particularly among evangelical Christians, about an "orphan crisis" abroad. Once China opened up to international adoption in the late 1990s, however, the dynamic switched--instead of too many babies, orphanages didn't have enough: when the Zeng family was struggling to pay fines for the twins, China's already ruthless Family Planning agency, now corrupted by "market forces," snatched Fangfang and sold her to an orphanage for a kickback. Demick relays this nightmarish tale in elegant, empathetic prose. It's a tour de force. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 theLos Angeles Times, Demick (author ofNothing 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 thejisheng 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
