Barbara Demick never intends to write the same story twice. A graduate of Yale who once wavered between physics and history, she found her calling when she walked into a newsroom for the first time.
“The minute I stepped into the newsroom, I knew it was just my people,” she says.
From the Balkans to the Himalayas to the sealed-off borders of North Korea, Demick has documented life under authoritarian regimes. Her latest work, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, uncovers one of the darkest corners of China’s one-child policy: the forced separation and international adoption of children.
“I like to write about the things that you can’t find out from the internet,” Demick says. Her curiosity leads her beyond headlines and satellite maps into China’s most remote villages, where official narratives fall apart.
In 2007 and 2008, she began hearing reports of babies taken from their families forcibly by family planning officials. “One of the families I interviewed in Hunan province had twin girls. They already had two daughters and were hoping for a boy. When the twins were born, they tried to hide them, but one was taken,” she says. The girl was violently seized at just under two years old. “Officials broke into the family house and grabbed her. It was a very violent episode.”
Years later, the family asked her to help find the missing twin. “The little girl who was left behind said, ‘I miss my sister. Can you find her?’” Demick did—and in 2019, she reunited the American adoptee with her birth family and identical twin in China.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is an indictment of a policy that changed the fabric of Chinese society. “The family planning apparatus had more personnel than the People’s Liberation Army,” Demick notes. “Families had very little choice but to give up children—usually girls, but sometimes boys.” While many in the West believed they were rescuing abandoned babies, Demick shows the reality was often much more sinister.
According to Demick, the adoptive parents were innocent. “They didn’t know there was a twin—they thought they were saving an abandoned baby girl,” she says.
She traces the arc of policy to unintended consequences. “After 2000, Chinese families didn’t want to give up their girls anymore. Attitudes were changing, and people were getting wealthier.”
But the demand from the West—particularly the United States—for healthy baby girls kept growing. “The orphanages had become dependent on adoption fees—$3,000 in cash,” she says. “They were badly funded by the government, so the money supported the disabled, the elderly. There was a whole system that developed, and eventually you had babies kidnapped and trafficked.”
Demick’s own reporting from China, particularly from 2008 onward, is aided by a rare window of journalistic freedom. “I could go most places. I was a print journalist, so I didn’t have big cameras. I wore shabby clothing and kind of disappeared.” She praises the openness of people in rural China: “People, especially in the countryside, were incredibly open. They wanted to talk.”
The contrast between the lives of the separated twins adds another layer. “They looked alike and had similar artistic interests,” she says, but over time, differences emerged. “The American twin, raised in Texas, had this can-do confidence,” Demick says. The Chinese twin had a good upbringing too, “but she didn’t have the same opportunities or self-assurance.”
As for China’s own reckoning with the one-child policy, Demick is skeptical. “You have tremendous social consequences—unmarried men, labor shortages, a distorted population pyramid,” she says. “Now the same family planning enforcers are going around telling people to have more babies.”
But there's been little accountability. “It was a kind of mania that swept China. Like when Mao had all the sparrows killed—just another episode of craziness. But it lasted a long time.”
Demick says technology-driven surveillance is the regime’s new tool of control. “The main means of control is in your pocket,” she says. This includes smartphones, payment apps, and health tracking. “It’s incredibly efficient and comprehensive,” she says. It results in a system where personal freedom is exchanged for order and prosperity.
According to Demick, “it’s an authoritarian regime with an authoritarian at the helm–but he’s a very competent authoritarian. “On the surface,” she says, “things look quite good.”
For all the economic and political analyses of China’s rise, Demick believes stories like the one she tells in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove are essential. They reveal what cannot be graphed—pain, loss, resilience, and the delicate connections that outlive even the most sweeping state policies.
“I spent a lot of time with these twins,” she says. “They are still developing. But what’s clear is that nurture has had a huge impact. Where you grow up, who raises you, what kind of choices you're given—it all matters.”
Sometimes, it takes a journalist climbing up a mountainside, crossing a river on a log bridge, and asking the right question to expose the invisible.
