Early in Barbara Demick’s exposé of child trafficking in the adoption markets of early-2000s China, she lists some of the chilling graffiti that appeared in Chinese towns during the height of the enforcement of the one-child policy: “Better blood flowing like streams than children born outside the state plan.”
The policy was ruthlessly enforced by family planning officers, who acted with impunity and sometimes outside the law – particularly in the period this book covers, when China’s increasing wealth meant a sudden shortage of excess children, and fewer lucrative overseas adoptions.
Demick’s illuminating and often heartbreaking exploration of the processes that led to the snatching of Chinese children and the obfuscation of their true origins is well-researched, allowing the reader to share the writer’s frustration and awe at the enormity of an operation carried out both by Chinese state employees and human traffickers.
In a country as vast as China, with its strict system of censorship, it was only the coming of the social media age that allowed these stories to leak – a book such as this can only scratch the surface of the misery experienced in the poorer provinces.
We follow Demick as she pieces together the story of the Zeng family, whose twin daughters were separated in their infancy, with daughter Fangfang/Esther snatched by Chinese authorities and later adopted by American parents.
Demick, whose own close friend adopted a Chinese baby in the years before these scandals broke, doesn’t shy away from the complexity of the issue – should we blame the American parents who were assured that the children they adopted were abandoned by their parents? Should children raised in middle-class, urban America be returned to rural China?
There are no easy answers here, but in tracking the tentative steps taken by both the American and Chinese branches of the family to reunite the twins, Demick demonstrates that the pathway towards some kind of resolution is more likely to be brought about by the kindness and empathy of individuals, rather than state action.
The stories here will hit close to home for Irish readers as we deal with our own legacies of forced overseas adoptions. A chilling insight into the birth of modern China, and a gripping read.
