First book of year - Finished

 I finished my first book of the year - Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption and Separated Twins.

In 1979 Chinese law was enacted to limit one child per family. You could petition or apply to have another child if your first baby was a girl.  Boys were desired and there were brutal laws about having children without a permit.  Having another child without a government sanctioned permit came with such severe penalties.   If you didn't have a planned birth you could be fined as much as a year's wages, have your house demolished and property confiscated.

If you were found pregnant without a permit a woman could be hog-tied and hauled away for a forced abortion.  Then they'd send you a bill. Those who hid an extra birth by giving the child to a family member to raise for a while were punished if a neighbor ratted them out.  Then the Family Planning Office would come seize the baby or toddler and take it to an orphanage where they would be a adopted out to foreigners.  All for a hefty price, it was like buying a child.

But that isn't how the government "marketed" the babies.  It was said the children were abandoned by their mothers so people felt good about adopting a child no one wanted.  An American family adopted a baby who, unbeknownst to them, was a twin.  What the adoptive family didn't know was this baby had a family who diligently searched for her for years.  There are many such scenarios like this.  Children taken and the birth families with little resources trying to find their babies.

This book details the history and focuses on one family in particular - the separated twins and how they came to find one another again.  It's good story, very sad at times.

Grace Newton, who is an adoptee and writes about it on her blog Red Thread Broken,  recalled a conversation she had on a flight to China.  Because she is Chinese the seatmate "launched into the familiar spiel about how "lucky" she was: "I didn't tell him how unlucky it is not to know your first family, to not know your medical history, to not know who you are and  have to fly seven thousand miles to try and figure it out, to feel like a foreigner wherever you go. Adoption has given me great opportunity,  but it was at a great cost," she wrote on her website.

The tags on this book are History, Adoption, China, Asia, Nonfiction, Memoir.

352 pages, 4.5 stars.

Linking up with Shelleyrae at Book'd Out for the 2026 Nonfiction Reading Challenge. Category: History