Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

Excellent...entrancing and disturbing. The New York Times

One of the world's best investigative journalists tells the true story of Chinese twins forcibly separated as babies through adoption trafficking, raised on opposite sides of the globe and only reunited as teens.

In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned.

Their understanding had been that China's brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents. What they didn't know—and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing—was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin.

Under China's one-child policy, hundreds of poor Chinese were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was sky-rocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages, who were selling them abroad.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick's role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China's history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact, and consequences of China's one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.

PRAISE

There were times when I almost forgot to breathe....the very best kind of nonfiction. Observer UK

A thrilling narrative. LA Review of Books

Demick has written with impeccable empathy for everyone involved, Chinese and western. The Times (UK)

Compelling and gripping. Literary Review

Lucid and poignant...beautifully written. Literary Review on Eat the Buddha

A superb storyteller, Demick melds the personal, the historical and the political seamlessly. New Internationalist on Eat the Buddha

A vivid, exhaustively researched, and ground-level view of the impact of history on people's lives... Compelling. New Statesman on Eat the Buddha