I'm Barbara Demick. I'm a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, formerly Beijing Bureau Chief,

and I'm author of Nothing to Envy, Normal Lives in North Korea, and Besieged Life on a Sarajevo Street.

Barbara Demick has had a long and distinguished career in journalism.

She's worked as the LA Times' bureau chief in Seoul, South Korea, and wrote a series of award-winning

articles about life under the North Korean regime. Then she moved to Beijing to continue reporting

for the paper before returning to her

native USA. Amongst all the stories she's worked on, there's one that stayed with her. And it

starts on an innocuous reporting trip back in 2009. I'm Maeve McLenigan. This is the tip-off.

Music I'm Maeve McClengan. This is the tip-off. When Barbara started a new role at the LA Times, there was one topic that immediately cried out to her.

I moved to Beijing in 2007 to run the Beijing Bureau for the Los Angeles Times.

I'd always been interested in adopted girls.

I had several friends who adopted from China.

And, you know, I'd heard all these stories about how these baby girls had been abandoned and that's why we were

adopting them, we Americans. There's something like 100,000 adopted Chinese girls in the U.S.

So I was really curious about how, where these girls were coming from?

You know, where were all these, you know, 100,000 abandoned baby girls coming from?

Were they being trafficked, stolen, kidnapped?

Full of questions, Barbara started to ask around.

She knew that the country still had a strict one-child policy at the time. It was only

dropped in 2015, and that many families favoured a male child over a female.

In small villages, Chinese government officials will, you know, go around, keeping track of

women's periods, looking for diapers on clotheslines, listening for the cries of

...