Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

Resumen del libro

The extraordinary and riveting story of separated Chinese twins, with one twin seized by the authorities and adopted into America, by the Samuel Johnson-winning author of Nothing to Envy. 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.

Biografía del autor

Barbara Demick es la autora de Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood y de Querido Líder, que fue finalista del National Book Award y del National Book Critics Circle Award y ganador del Premio Samuel Johnson de no ficción en 2010. Sus libros han sido traducidos a más de veinticinco idiomas. Demick es redactora de Los Angeles Times y colaboradora de The New Yorker, y recientemente fue nominada como miembro del Consejo de Relaciones Exteriores.