Journalist Barbara Demick Traces Decades of Trauma From China’s One-Child Policy
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Leslie McClurg in for Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, imagine finding out you have a twin who lives on the other side of the world. In Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, journalist Barbara Demick uncovers the true story of twin girls born in rural China separated at birth. One grew up in a mountain village and the other in Texas.

victims of China's one-child policy. We look back at that policy and how it led to international adoption, stolen babies, and families that are only now learning the truth. That's next after this news. This is Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. And I remember hearing the horror stories about these little girls who were abandoned in China during the country's one-child policy, and then the tens of thousands of adoptions that followed in Western countries like the U.S.,

And American parents thought that they were saving newborns who were, you know, horribly abandoned in cardboard boxes. And some of them really were. But there were also babies that were snatched from their birth parents to feed the demand of adoption overseas. Barbara Demick is the former Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. And she's the author of the new book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, which goes into China's one-child policy. Welcome, Barbara. Thanks so much.

Your book begins in 2000 with the story of Zanhua, a mother of two. She has two little girls who are under five at this point, but she's pregnant again. She doesn't know at the time that she is carrying twins, and she's very, very nervous because of the climate in China at the time. What had her family already endured?

Well, they had already had two girls and under the law, which is known as the one-child policy, had a lot of that's kind of shorthand for some complicated rules. If your first child was a girl and you lived in the countryside, you were allowed to have a second child, but you had to wait.

And their only fault was that they didn't wait long enough. And family planning, which was this monstrous enforcement agency, actually destroyed part of this house they were building. And the enforcement of this

quote-unquote one-child policy was really, really brutal. People were beaten up, their houses were demolished, they lost homes, they lost jobs, they lost vehicles. Family planning officials would confiscate farm animals and well, then they started confiscating babies. And just to go back historically, why did China put this policy into place?

This goes back to these notions from the 70s that the world was about to explode because of excess population. There was a

a famous book called The Population Bomb that predicted mass starvation because of too many people. And this idea was, as a friend of mine says, was sort of like the idea du jour. It was like bell bottoms and sideburns, you know, too many babies. And a lot of countries were trying to restrict births, including India. But China was

you know, a great place to do it because there weren't really religious impediments to birth control or abortion and you didn't have free elections. You had a

one-party system and China was in a hurry. They wanted to get rich fast, boost their economy, and a way to boost per capita income is to lower the capita. This is like a little bit nerdy math stuff, but it's the denominator. Fewer people, the per capita income looks higher.

The Chinese government, when they do something, they do it with a vengeance. It was like this mania. They built this family planning, that's sort of a euphemism for these enforcers, this apparatus with 83 million people. It was

Bigger than the People's Liberation Army. And, you know, it was kind of a period of craziness. I mean, quite a bit bigger, right? 83 million in the family planning. And I think you said in the book it was there were 3 million personnel in the Chinese military. Yeah, yeah.

And I was floored to learn how they policed birth control inside factories. Can you give us kind of paint a picture of how they went about trying to enforce this? Oh, well, this was this was are we allowed to talk about menstrual periods on this show? Well, they had what they called.

the nickname was the period police. And you had to show your bloody napkins to register that you were having your period. And if you didn't, and you were of childbearing age, it was assumed that you were pregnant. And then a lot of work units, they really kept track of the periods.

And for people in the countryside, you know, really in remote areas, family planning officials or, you know, other government officials who were working with family planning would like, you know, skulk around looking for baby clothes and diapers. There were only cloth diapers then, usually rags, but hanging on clotheslines. And, you know, it was a really very intrusive policy.

And you mentioned there that the Zungs, the family with Zen Hua who had these two babies, they'd already had the roof smashed in and now she's pregnant with two more babies. Did they have any options? Could you pay? Was there a fee? Was there any way out of their situation?

You could pay, but most people in the countryside didn't have the money. The fines would be up to four to six times your income, depending on the nature of your violation, if you were a first offender or a second offender. They were, you know, they would have been a third offender. And, you know, they had, like many Chinese, they lived in kind of a subsistence environment.

They were basically rice farmers and would occasionally go out as migrants to do manual labor in the cities. But no, they didn't have that kind of money. And we should say, I think you said you had to walk on a goat path and cross through streams to get to this. This was a very, very remote village that they were in. And yet still, they were quite scared of the officials. But beyond all that, they'd...

She ended up giving birth in a bamboo grove and to these two twins, Shuangzhe and Fengfeng. How did she and her husband then, what decision did they make in terms of trying to take care of these two twins?

Well, you know, it was funny. They had been under a lot of pressure from Zeng Youdong's father, the paternal father-in-law, to have a boy who would carry the family name and all that stuff. But Zeng himself, the father, actually really liked girls.

And he, when he found out that his wife, instead of having the son, had had two more girls, he couldn't stop laughing. He just laughed for days because it was kind of comeuppance, you know, against the older generation, like,

"Ha ha, we have two more girls." But he really liked girls and they never considered abandoning them or abandoning one of them, but they needed to figure out how to hide them. So they came up with a subterfuge that sounds very creative, but it was pretty common. Like a lot of people who had

girls really did want to keep them and so they tried various methods and they decided to divide them up to split them up because twins would be so noticeable and attract so much gossip in the village and one twin would go to live with an aunt and uncle who lived in the same village and they would pretend that was their daughter and

and the other twin they would bring with them to a nearby city because this is also so common when people had kids. The parents, in order to earn cash, they had to go to a city. So they wanted to go do some migrant work to get cash to pay the fines. So the girls were split up when they were about six months old. And Fang Fang was left with her aunt and uncle.

You know, it was actually a pretty good situation because the two older sisters were also in the village and the grandmother was in the village. And it's, you know, we say it takes a village, but, you know, there was a village and family raising this child. And the child was...

You know, loved by all. It sounds like she was quite charismatic and quite smart. And then unfortunately, and not surprisingly, family planning did eventually arrive. Can you walk us through the day that unfortunately the family lost Feng Feng?

Yeah, it was crazy. Family planning officials kept on coming to the house trying to get the baby. And there were two older boys in that house, the aunt and uncle's kids. And they were, I guess, like 10 and 12 at the time.

And because they were kids, they were really fast. And so these family planning officials who were, you know, sort of heavy middle-aged men who smoked a lot of cigarettes would come and the boys would grab the kid and run and they were much faster. But they came one day when the aunt was there alone and they sent 10 men and they just burst through the door and they

immobilized the aunt. They just like grabbed her by the arms and grabbed her by the legs. And Fang Fang, who was then almost two, just, you know, held it, was holding onto her shirt, like with her tight fists, holding the cloth. And one of the men just peeled her fingers off, separated her fingers and grabbed her. And, you know, everybody was screaming. Like the whole village came out, the older sisters came out.

And, you know, they carried her out like a, you know, kind of like a trophy. And they had parked a car nearby facing, you know, away so they could make an escape, put her in the car. And the aunt, whose name was Shouhua, went running after the car, but she didn't have her shoes on and she couldn't catch the car. And that was...

The last they saw them, well, for a long time, but it was, that was the, you know, that was it. And do they know or were they told anything? Do they know where, I mean, like you said, they lost her, but do you know where she went next? I know, but there was, there were all sorts of crazy rumors and rumors.

A lot of people thought that these babies who were taken were being trafficked for their organs or some, you know, this was an urban legend. But no, they didn't really know. They assumed she was being sold because there was a lot of child trafficking in China. But for what purpose, they didn't know. And they didn't know anything about

international adoption. You know, this was a phenomenon. I'm in New York, but in New York there was like, there were so many Chinese baby girls around and a lot of my friends adopted. And, you know, they were like the America's sweethearts. They were on the cover of the New York Times Magazine section. But in China, it wasn't exactly a secret, but it wasn't publicized either.

And, you know, these Chinese families, to these Chinese families, the idea that a baby could be sent to America was like as preposterous as that she'd been resettled on Mars. So they really had no idea. And the officials, you know, asked for various fines and everything.

you know, this much money and that much money, but, you know, they didn't have the money. And I don't think that the family planning officials were really negotiating in good faith. I mean, what they wanted was the baby. We want to get into what happened next and continue to talk about child's one child policy. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. And we're talking about the ramifications of China's one-child policy and the true story of one little girl who was seized from her loved ones and then placed into adoption by Chinese officials, unbeknownst to her family. We just heard that story. We're joined by Barbara Demick. She's the former bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times.

And she was in Beijing, and she's also the author of the new book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, From China to America, A True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins. We'd love to hear from you. Do you have any experiences with or know someone involved in an international adoption from China? Do you know anyone who has a similar story to Feng Feng?

Did you live in China during their one-child policy? What was your experience like? You can email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org, or you can find us on any of the social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, Discord threads. Again, we're at KQED Forum. Or we'd love to hear your voice. Give us a call now at 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786.

You kind of hinted at it there, Barbara, that there was this huge burgeoning international adoption market. It started in the 1990s, and it was very, very popular. Why did it take off so fast, and why were these Chinese girls so wanted by American families? I mean, Chinese girls were really unique in the adoption market because their families were quite healthy. They were their only children.

fault was the one-child policy. And often with international adoptees, they came from a situation of great, great poverty, poor prenatal care. A lot of them had fetal alcohol syndrome. And so these Chinese adoptees were considered very healthy. And I think parents felt they were doing a great mitzvah by

taking in a child who might have been abandoned. There was a lot of anti-China propaganda about how the Chinese parents didn't love their daughters, they only wanted sons. There were a couple of real horror stories about babies thrown in wells. I mean, some of it was true, but for the most part at this time, the 1990s,

Chinese did want to keep their daughters, but they were under tremendous pressure. And, you know, I don't blame the adoptive parents. They really thought they were doing something good. And, you know, in fact, probably through the 90s, the babies really had been abandoned. I mean, under duress, but they had been abandoned.

But by about 2000, China was growing so fast economically that rural families could more easily afford to pay the fines and the whole

notion of girls being worthless had changed with industrialization. Girls, women, young women were working in the factories, making almost as much money as men, and the whole value system had changed, and this patriarchal tradition was eventually eroding.

there weren't as many abandoned babies anymore. And this was just when demand was picking up. These were supply chain problems. This is like what we had during COVID. The supply chain broke down. And, you know, something that I should mention because it's important here,

Most of the adoption fees were channeled through Beijing through a central government agency, and I've not discovered any corruption there.

but there was a requirement that adoptive parents contribute $3,000 cash to the orphanage that fostered their child. These were state-run orphanages. And that money was kind of what kept the system going. That $3,000 was what incentivized this corruption and child snatching.

The orphanages had become very dependent on that money and of course some of it was frittered away with corruption, but a lot of it was used to fund operations. These were state-run orphanages that were not really well financed by the government.

And at its peak, how many babies, or I shouldn't say at its peak, but how many babies overall during this period, 1990s to when the program stopped in 2024, how many Chinese babies were adopted overseas? And do you have any sense of how many were snatched from families? There were 160,000 who were adopted worldwide and about half, about 80,000,

went to the US, so you have a sizable population. And an investigator who I worked with, Brian Stey, who runs an agency out of Utah, he estimated that about 10% were taken or relinquished under duress. You know, it's hard, there's sort of a continuum of pressure.

In the case of Feng Feng, they grabbed her. There was physical force. But another case I wrote about, there was some trickery.

There were various methods that they would get the kids. Often they would exploit families where older grandparents were babysitting. They always found some weakness with the families, but I think that 10% is probably about right, and it's mostly after 2000.

A listener writes, "Are adoptees able to find their biological families with DNA services like Ancestry.com? Is it popular in China to use such services?" That's a great question. I just did a piece about that. Actually, the last chapter of the book deals entirely with that. It's called "Searching," and the answer is yes, very much so. Adoptees are

putting their DNA samples in 23andMe and other services. And there are some groups, actually the same group in Utah, which is called DNA Connect, collects samples from Chinese birth families who are looking for their kids. And there's another group called Nanchang Project,

that is sending DNA samples for adoptees to a Chinese police database. And they've had some success too. So I would say like, I personally know of maybe five, six hundred

Girls who've, girls, women, now women, who've found their birth families, but there's probably, you know, a thousand or so. It's, you know, it's still a fraction. But I think that all of the adoptees, if they want...

can probably find their biological families if the biological families want. You know, it's like a dating game. But if both sides want, I think they can find each other. And they are. I know of a lot of cases. And how, I'm sure it depends on the individuals and the individual families, but how do people respond when they learn, number one, that they were adopted, you know, maybe under

poor circumstances. And the biological families, how do they respond when they learn that they didn't maybe save some child, some newborn who was abandoned in a cardboard box? I think everybody reacts differently. I mean, I'll talk about Fong Fong. She found out when she was nine years old, and this was because of me. I don't know if I should go into this story now, but I had interviewed

the mother and the remaining twin in 2009. That's when I was based in Beijing. And I was traipsing around rural China writing a series of stories about

whose kids were taken for adoption. And I interviewed Shuang Jie, the remaining twin who was nine, and took a video of her saying, "I miss my twin sister. I'd like to play with her. I'd like to share clothes." That part of the book was so touching. It's a little bit, yeah, it's a little hokey, but it's all true. And so that ran in the Los Angeles Times in 2009.

And there's a lot of little complications here, but basically somebody sent it to the adoptive family who were in Texas. And Fung Fung had been adopted by evangelical Christians who had actually started an NGO to rescue abandoned babies. You know, it was very humanitarian.

That whole thing with the evangelicals was very big then. It's a whole other tangent. But anyway, it was in the newspaper and the adoptive mother, Marcia, saw it and tried to keep it from the child. But Esther, as her name was, was... Esther as Fong Fong. Esther as Fong Fong was a very smart little girl.

And she looked at her mother's email and looked at her cell phone and figured it out. And she was nine at the time and she was horrified, just horrified because she thought, "They're going to make me go back to China." And she was almost two and a half when she was adopted. But this is very typical of adoptees and it's possibly because of the trauma.

Most people don't remember anything that happens before they're three, but especially adoptees have gone through a lot of trauma.

and they just don't remember. Something called infantile amnesia. And so she already felt like an outlier. She was living in a very rural town in Texas with no other Asians, very few, not even Latinos. It was a very white town. And then she felt like she wasn't even like a regular adoptee. So she was terrified.

Although I had figured out where she was, I didn't want to write anything because I didn't, you know, you had to protect a nine-year-old girl. I couldn't out her. And I just, I took the material I had and I sent it to the family and said, you know, don't worry. This is just what I found out. But when she turned 16, 17,

She was a photographer, she was very into fashion and body type, and she decided she really wanted to tap into her Chinese roots and meet her twin sister. And that's the point where they contacted me and asked me to help.

her, this was a long way of answering your question, what's the reaction? You know, she really wanted to be in touch with her biological family. Adoptees really are all over the place. They're individuals a lot. Just feel like, you know, they would be

opening a door to something that could be very painful, that their birth family might, you know, expect money or filial affection. It's a very complicated, yeah, sort of mind to wrap around that your history wasn't actually the history you thought it was. Let's go to the phones. Brian in Emeryville, you're on the air.

Yeah, hi. My wife and I adopted a little girl from China back in 2005. She's our daughter.

and she's still living with us. She adopted her as an infant. Pardon me. And I found that the Chinese government operated, you know, as far as we're concerned, pretty well. The adoption agency we used in the Bay Area told us there's generally not a tradition of having to pay bribes like in some other countries, and we found that, in fact, they didn't ask for any bribes.

But we did have to go fly to China with a suitcase full of cash. And the government of China required us to bring the money in new $100 bills, like bills wrapped by the bank. And so it was like $14,000 or something like that.

in new $100 bills. And we went into a little room. We were in Hunan, China. And we were in whatever city. It was Chengsha. And then we gave over the briefcase of cash. They counted the money in front of us. Then they left the room and they came out moments later with our baby. So it was very, it was a creepy feeling.

But the whole time the adoption agency kept on telling us, "You're not buying a baby." And I said, "But we have to pay though, right?" "Well, yes, but you're not buying a baby." So it was like they were very, they didn't like that image, but that is a fact. You're buying a baby.

And so then there's other things like I asked, we went to adoption classes here in the adoption agency in the Bay Area. And I asked the question, how much does it cost? And they were sort of aghast like that I would ask such a question.

And I said, well, you know, we're not rich, so we have to be able to plan for this. Brian, I'm curious. It's outrageous that they were. Right. How do you reconcile what you're hearing about these babies that were potentially snatched from families with the story of your daughter? Well, yeah.

Yes, we have, my wife and I have talked, and our daughter, we've talked a lot about this. We have no idea where biological parents are, and because she was left in a train station in Changsha, in Chengzhou, Hunan, with a note, she's in a basket with a note, she was 10, no, she's less than that, she's like eight months old. No, she was less than that, she was an infant, because we had thought there when she was 10, 10 months, I'm sorry. Okay.

There was a note in her basket that said, I was born today. This is from the biological mom. And I'm sorry I have to give up my baby. Please take care of her. And then we got the note and we showed it to our Chinese friends who translated it.

But, you know, we've heard that, you know, the government has, after the fact, we've learned that the Chinese government was snatching people's babies. And, you know, they would write notes like that, fictitious notes. And so it's just creepy. It's really creepy to think about. Wow, Brian, that is quite the story. Yeah, go ahead. Good night, good night. It's really an interesting story.

2005 is a very critical year. That was the record year for adoptions from China, but it was also the year that the scandals started coming out. And there were a couple of things that year. The town that I wrote about where Feng Feng was taken, a group of parents got together and wrote a petition and started protesting. And there was also a big child trafficking bust

I think it was in December 2005. So things were starting to leak out in the Chinese press or social media. They'd get censored immediately, but the stories were coming out. I think until then, the adoption agencies in the US didn't know anything. But by 2005, that was like kind of when it all started falling apart.

Your daughter's note might be genuine, but as I was saying earlier, there's a continuum here of duress. They may have gone to the family.

and said, you know, you keep this child and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, your other children will be punished. There's something in China called a hukou. It's a registration document. And if you're not properly registered, that child is not going to be able to go to school or get medical care. They're like a non-person.

And so, you know, families faced all sorts of duress. You know, they may have given her up because they wanted a boy or they may have given her up because they just were, you know, facing so much pressure. Brian, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Wow. We are talking about the ramifications of China's one-child policy. And we've heard just there of a story of a little girl who was adopted in dire circumstances. And we're also hearing the story that Barbara Demick is relaying in her new book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, about two twins who were separated. One grew up in Texas and one grew up in rural China. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim, and we're talking about China's one-child policy.

and the stories of families who lost their child to the adoption, international adoption market. We're joined by Barbara Demick. She's former bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. She worked in Beijing. She's also the author of the new book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove. We'd love to hear from you. Do you have an experience or do you know someone with an international adoption from China? Or maybe do you have a similar story to what we heard there from Brian or from Feng Feng?

Did you live in China during the one-child policy? What was it like? You can email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org. You can also find us on all the social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, Discord threads. We're at KQED Forum. Or give us a call right now at 866-733-6786. Again, 866-733-6786. I'd really love to hear what it was like in China when this policy was unfolding.

Chris writes, "I myself was adopted from Asia, but outside of China, I find the concept of tracing origins too traumatic to even consider. But with Asian adoptive parents, I could at least get by without questions. How have adoptees from China faced the challenge of finding their roots?" Barbara? Thanks. That's a good question. I mean, everybody is different.

you know, there are a lot of Asian adoptees, mostly Korean. There's a lot of Korean adoptees. And, you know, again, some people just feel like, I don't think it's as much about disloyalty to the adoptive parents as feeling like they don't think they'll, they don't know what they're going to find

and they don't want to open a door that is going to cause a lot of trauma and difficulty. And there are others who have spent years, years looking for birth parents because they want to know their personal history.

And, you know, even if they don't meet their birth parents, they want to know. They want to, you know, make sense of their lives and see who they look like or where these qualities come from. And I can't say that one approaches...

better than another. You know, it's interesting, Feng Feng, now Esther, she has a sister who was also adopted from China. She's a few years older. And she has said she has no interest, that she doesn't have that need. She doesn't want to go there. She's just content with who she is now.

Yeah, they're all over the place. And the adoptive parents, too. Although, you know, it used to be, you know, assumed that the adoptive parents were very hostile to the idea of finding birth families as though, you know, that would maybe, you know, weaken their own family bonds. But I found many cases where parents of adopted Chinese girls or...

really even maybe more eager than the girls themselves. Was that true with Marcia? Yes, it was true with Marcia. I don't know if she was more eager, but she very wisely decided that she would not do anything until Esther wanted, that she would wait till Esther was old enough to take the lead, and I think that was the right thing to do.

At the time that she found out that Esther had been taken from her family, I mean, she was horrified because Marsha, you know, her motives for adopting were largely humanitarian. And she has a very strong ethical streak and

She was just horrified by that and she would have liked to contact the biological family, but she felt that it wasn't her role, that the first priority was her daughter. But once Esther said she wanted to meet her twin sister and her birth family, Marcia was all in and made it happen.

and you were involved in connecting them, and then there was a physical meeting. What was that like when the two families met, the two girls met? Oh, my gosh. I mean, I'd like to say it was magic because it was magic, but it was also very awkward. We've likened it to like a first date. You bring these two people together,

And it's like, you know, what's your favorite color? What do you like to eat? You know, what are your hobbies? Before they met in person, I arranged for them to send letters to each other, and then I arranged two video conferences on this app, WeChat, that's very popular in China. And

It was just, it was funny because there were so many misunderstandings even to figure out what time of day it was. And, you know, there are a lot of cultural things. Esther's an American. She likes to swim. Shuang Jie doesn't know how to swim, but she plays badminton. Just funny, funny things. I think the video talks about

You know, they were good, but they didn't get that far. And they don't speak the same language. Esther doesn't speak Chinese anymore. Shuangzhi doesn't speak English. But when we got to China, the bond between them, this physical bond was so, you know, so palpable and overwhelming. They were very...

Chinese tend to not be as physical as Americans. They're not big huggers. But they were so close, it was like they were going back into the womb. I mean, twins, that's magical. Let's go back to the phones. Paul in San Francisco, you're on the air. We haven't gone.

twice, which means Chinese. And we began the process in the late, I think late 90s, early 2000s, I think late 90s. And we hired an attorney who was a Chinese national living in New York.

And he set us up with an agency in China. And it took forever because of the geopolitical, you know, the consequences going out at that particular point. If there was a blip on the geopolitical screen, you know, the adoption process would stop. So it was really six months, eight months, nine months before we finally got that letter and a photo that we could come to China. And we got this beautiful photo. And once you get a photo,

That's your daughter. And we showed it to people and so proud of it. So we get to China. We took my other daughter, who was four years old at that point. We got to mid country. We were at the we got to the airport and our liaison said, go into the hotel and your baby is in your room.

You know, I said, your baby, we ordered bagels. She didn't think that was very funny. But anyway, so we get to the hotel and my wife goes upstairs with my other daughter and she comes downstairs. I was getting the luggage out of the van and she says, Paul, there's a baby in our room, but it's not our baby. And I said, what do you mean? It's not it's not our picture. Here's the picture of our baby. This baby is little. This baby is in a crib, etc.,

go upstairs and be absolutely right, not our baby. So the group, our liaison comes in from the airport and we said, "Wait, Lynn, there's a baby in our room, but it's not our baby."

And she said, how do you know? And we said, here's the picture, et cetera. She comes up and she says, you're right, et cetera. She calls someone on the phone and says, there's been a mistake. Your baby is coming tomorrow. Can this baby stay in your room tonight? Oh, my God. And we said, sure. I mean, absolutely. So we

We said to my 40-year-old daughter, don't get connected. This is not your sister, et cetera, et cetera. So the next day, a knock on the door at 10 o'clock, a little girl comes through who's walking.

and we're like that's not our baby oh my gosh what is going on i sat them down i said what is going on here we have two children in our room one girl who's probably two years old another one who's probably six months seven months old what is going on where is our child where is this baby in this photo the women sat down and my our interpreter

Then, oh, she grabbed herself. And I said, what? And she said, your baby died in October. Oh, my gosh. And I said, what? What? The baby died in October? And you never told us? We came over here in this ruse? And, you know, it was just astonishing. So then they said, you know, you have two children in your room. You can choose either one or we can bring in other children. Yeah.

And we said, look, we're not in the we're not baby buyers. We're not babies. You know, clearly the baby who was in the crib last night is the baby met for us. So the women from the orphanage said fine.

little baby in the crib became our child. And my wife says I can still look at the little girl who was let out of the room with tears coming down her eyes that she was rejected. And it was the most astonishing. And, you know, when we really thought about it,

the difference between cultures i said to myself you know this is the difference between a country that has 300 million people of the us and a country that has a billion people and girls were commodities and girls were not you know appreciated accepted they were sort of

I hate to use the word trash, but they were just, you know, give it away. Paul, we were dying to know in the studio here, how is your, you said your daughter is 28 today. How is she doing and how does she reconcile this story?

She is great. She has a master's degree from a major university. She's got a great job. She's one of the most social, she's one of the most wonderful people

women, young women imaginable. And we told her the story. It took us a while to really tell her all the contours of the story, all the ins and outs of the story. And she just accepted it. And she sort of she's not interested in going back to China. She has no interest in that. She she when we lived in New York, she.

We went to a lot of Chinese events, Chinese New Year, and she wasn't very interested in that. And she's, you know, I said at one point, why are you not interested in the cultural things? And she said, Dad, I'm an American. I don't feel any. I've been here since I was seven months old. I don't feel any affinity towards China. I don't. She's never said she wanted to seek out possible cultures.

So parents, birth parents, because it's, you know, as you all know, it's so difficult to find. But no, she's great. Well, wow, Paul, that is, that is, I'm so glad. And I'm, wow, that is an absolutely incredible story. I think we all teared up in the studio hearing about the little girl who unfortunately did not become your daughter. Yeah.

Thank you for sharing that. You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. We're talking about the ramifications of child's one-child policy and the adoptees that landed in America with Barbara Demick, who is the former bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and also the author of the new book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.

Chris writes, excuse me, a listener, right? No, let's see. Sorry, I'm getting this. A listener asks, I read that the one child policy led to skewed demographics in certain generations. There are far more men than there are women in finding a partner can be very hard for men of a certain age. Has the author seen that? Yes, absolutely. That was one of the, you know, remains one of the

the results of the one-child policy, there are more males than females. It was up to like 1.3 males to one female in some areas. And so especially the rural men who are not considered as desirable on the marriage market have been stuck

without wives, and it's led to bride trafficking from neighboring countries, from Myanmar and Nepal and North Korea. And it's kind of funny, the Chinese government has completely reversed course now. They ended the one-child policy in 2015, and now the same people who used to force abortions and

you know, really punish women for having too many babies are going around offering incentives. They like going around offering rice cookers and water bottles to have more kids. It's just like this 180 degree turn that is really crazy, but it's not working very well because, you know, there's not enough women in China of childbearing age

to replenish the population. And actually, China is no longer the most populous country in the world. It's now India. And China's population is expected to really drop in half by the end of the century. Noelle on Discord Rikes: Didn't this also happen in South Korea? And I think you mentioned that lots of adoptees, but without a one-child policy. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened in South Korea?

Yeah, and I was going to mention South Korea because hearing Paul's story, that's a very—I never heard anything like that from China, but I've heard that from Korea. There were a lot of abandoned babies in Korea after the Korean War. I mean, every disaster brings about a fresh crop—is that kind of a demeaning word?—of adoptees.

But through especially the 70s and the 80s, South Korea was the largest exporter of babies. And there were a lot of different factors. There was poverty. There was also a very kind of strict Confucian ideals about not just...

you know, boys over girls, but because there were boys adopted too, but the sense that you, that a woman couldn't have a baby on her own. And even if a couple divorced or if the husband died, the mother would be expected to give up the child. So it was very kind of different from China. And also, I mean, I think this is a generalization, but the

Korean culture is more squeamish about premarital and extramarital sex. So there were a lot of different factors, but there's now a lot of investigations of fraud in Korean adoption and what Paul was saying about

getting a different baby. I've heard a lot from Korea that if somebody, if a family went through the whole process of adopting and their child died or for some reason wasn't available, they would substitute another child.

And these cases are now under investigation. I mean, South Korea is very different. It's a democracy, and they've set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and also have sort of a government service to help adoptees find their birth families, and a lot are.

Well, Barbara Demick, this is a fascinating book. I literally couldn't set it down the last few days. So I highly recommend it to our audience. Again, the title is Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, From China to America, A True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins. There's a lot more that we didn't cover in today's show. Thank you again, Barbara. Thanks so much. And thank you to all of our listeners for your stories and your comments today. Have a wonderful weekend. I'm Leslie McClurg in today for Mina Kim. Take care.

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