Journalist Barbara Demick Traces Decades of Trauma From China’s One-Child Policy

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nearly a decade after the end of China’s one-child policy, families are still reeling from its traumas. In multiple cases, officials in China forcibly took children away from their families and placed them up for adoption, fulfilling a lucrative overseas demand for baby girls. In her new book “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove,” journalist Barbara Demick tells the story of one girl named Fangfang, rechristened Esther, who was taken away from her twin sister and family and adopted by a white Christian couple in Texas. We talk to Demick about Fangfang’s story and how it illuminates the one-child policy’s lasting impacts on adoptees and their families in China and abroad. Guests: Barbara Demick, author, "Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins" - former Beijing Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Welcome to the year 2000.
0:02.8	Everyone, everywhere, is having fun, except me.
0:06.6	On BBC Eye Player.
0:08.0	I worry you're growing up too fast.
0:10.6	Yeah, we can't be your little ducky forever, can I?
0:13.0	Inspired by a true story.
0:14.8	Walk out of this house a boy, one day you'll come back.
0:17.8	When you do, you will be a man.
0:20.2	I won't hold your breath. What it feels like for a girl. I wish I could look like you. come back. When you do, you will be a man. Oh, and urge your breath.
0:21.5	What it feels like for a girl.
0:23.2	I wish I could look like you.
0:24.7	Bebe, you can.
0:26.2	Why don't you?
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1:22.8	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Leslie McClurg in Formina Kim.
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