Daughters Are Not Like Spilled Water

Susan Blumberg-Kason reviews recent books about the aftermath of China’s one-child policy and the experience of women in contemporary China.

By Susan Blumberg-KasonJune 5, 2025

• Gender & Sexuality

• Cultural Studies

LAST AUGUST, China quietly ended its three decades of international adoptions. This cessation came almost a decade after China—again quietly—put an end to its one-child policy, which also lasted more than three decades. In her new book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, Barbara Demick analyzes how the one-child policy was not just responsible for the gender imbalance in China but also contributed to tens of thousands of international adoptions, not all of which were conducted honorably or honestly.

Demick worked as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in China from the peak of international adoptions in the mid-2000s to just a year before the one-child policy ended in January 2016—after a long period when Chinese demographers were calling for a shift away from the policy for pragmatic as well as ethical reasons. While reporting from China, Demick uncovered some difficult truths about international adoptions in a country that was supposed to be the among the most ethical in the world. Authors such as Mara Hvistendahl (Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, 2011) and Mei Fong (One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, 2016) have written general interest books about China’s one-child policy, detailing its flaws and arguing that the country’s population would have naturally decreased with industrialization anyway, without tight limitations on numbers of births. Those books also show how the one-child policy led to a troubling gender imbalance in the country. Demick weaves the histories of both China’s one-child policy and Chinese international adoptions into the story of a pair of separated twins, making for a thrilling narrative that concludes with the cessation of China’s international adoptions last year.

Identical twins Fangfang and Shuangjie were born in a mountainous village in Hunan province, the third and fourth children in their family. Fangfang, the older of the twins, was a healthy baby, but Shuangjie was a little sickly and needed more care. Fearful of the local family planning office, the twins’ parents worried that they would be caught and punished for having more than one child. They already had a second daughter after their first was born, but they worried they would have a difficult time evading attention with twins. So, they sent Fangfang to live with her aunt and uncle.

Demick writes about two scandals that plagued Chinese adoptions. The first involved individuals trafficking babies and toddlers, taking them from their homes and bringing them to orphanages. The second involved government family planning offices doing the same. Both the individual traffickers and the family planning offices made massive amounts of money “facilitating” these adoptions to foreign parents. As Demick writes about these revelations:

They shattered many of the myths about Chinese adoption, horrifying adoptive parents who had been assured repeatedly that the program was corruption-free. And when the birth parents eventually found out, it would be a revelation. They hadn’t appreciated the demand for their daughters outside of China. […] They would realize that, no, daughters were not like spilled water. Their lives weren’t as cheap as kittens’. They were so precious that people would steal, cheat, and lie to get them.

Certainly not all international adoptions were conducted in a nefarious way, but Demick learns that Fangfang was taken from her aunt and uncle’s home when the local family planning office found out that she wasn’t an only child. Parents could be slapped with high fees—amounting to several years’ worth of their salaries—but it was usually difficult, if not impossible, to come up with this amount of money in the short period of time they were given. And once babies and toddlers were taken by the family planning offices or by private traffickers and brought to orphanages, administrators of the orphanages placed advertisements in obscure publications to see if any family members wanted to claim them. These publications were not ones that the average person would read, so it was almost guaranteed that the children would never be claimed. The orphanages could then assure the adoptive parents that their babies or toddlers were abandoned and that they had tried to locate family members, to no avail.

In her reporting in the 2000s, Demick discovered that Fangfang, now called Esther and living in Texas, had a twin sister in China. In this age of DNA ancestry testing and the desire to learn family medical history, Demick could not simply sit with the knowledge that Esther had a biological sister—and a twin at that—back home. Esther’s American family wasn’t receptive to this information and worried that Esther’s birth parents would try to take back their daughter. But after a decade, that all changed, and Demick heard from Esther’s adopted brother in the United States:

I bolted upright. Before New York, I’d spent seven years as a China correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. I was based in Beijing but often worked in the countryside, writing about life in the left-behind backwaters of modern China. Reporting on this little girl was one of my most memorable experiences. This was a story that took me to places few foreigners had seen, geographically and psychically. Not only into remote mountain villages but also deep into the intimate realm of Chinese families. Of course, I hadn’t forgotten.

Demick narrates the eventual reunion between Shuangjie and Esther and observes how the Chinese and American families interact and coexist. One could presume that Esther enjoyed a “better” life than Shuangjie, but Demick shows otherwise. Shuangjie grew up to become a teacher in Changsha, a modern city of five million people. She fought societal pressure to marry early and can support herself financially. In rural Texas, Esther forwent college, worked at a grocery store right out of high school, and developed a successful photography business. With China’s incredible economic growth, especially in cities like Changsha, the standard of living has changed dramatically since the onset of the one-child policy and the decades of international adoption that saw 160,000 Chinese children leave the country.

With the easing of the one-child policy and the decreasing population rate, one could also presume that Chinese women and girls now enjoy more freedoms than in recent decades. Leta Hong Fincher shows this is not true. Just over a decade ago, she published Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2014), an astonishing book that revealed the dismal implications for young Chinese women in light of the campaign to push them into marriage before the age of 26. In 2023, Hong Fincher came out with a 10th anniversary updated edition of the book, which pairs nicely with Demick’s and provides a fuller picture of women in contemporary China.

One of the most eye-opening parts of the first edition of Leftover Women was Hong Fincher’s exploration of the exclusion of young, upwardly mobile women in China’s booming real estate business. Families pool their money for down payments on houses and condos for male relatives, even distant ones, rather than help out a daughter. Hong Fincher explains: “The problem for women extends far beyond the fact that most homes are registered in the man’s name alone. My research suggests that many—if not most—of China’s male-owned marital homes are heavily financed by the wife or girlfriend.”

Ten years since Leftover Women was first published, Hong Fincher finds that little has changed in this regard. China enjoys one of the highest rates of homeownership in the world, so it would make sense that young, upwardly mobile women would be able to own their own homes. What makes China different, however, is that banks and the government put systems in place to pressure women into marriage and motherhood. Their husbands’ names are usually the only ones on the titles, and if there’s a divorce, the husband keeps their property. Women therefore have little incentive to leave unhappy and even abusive relationships.

In 2016, China passed a law to protect against domestic violence, but little is done to enforce it. This was especially evident when domestic violence skyrocketed during the pandemic while people were stuck at home. And it continues to be difficult for women to get out of dangerous marriages if they don’t own property.

Apart from the property issue, Han Chinese women are being pressured into marriage at a young age so they can give birth to several children before they turn 35, which is quite a reversal from the strict one-child policy. Yet not all women in China are being encouraged to have lots of babies. As Hong Fincher writes:

The stories emerging about what was supposed to be a more permissive era following the end of the “one-child policy” instead paint an ominous picture for the future of women’s reproductive rights in China. The new birth-planning regime may mean a relaxation of birth limits for those Han Chinese women who want to have more babies, but it marks a dramatic tightening of reproductive controls on Uyghur, Kazakh and other ethnic minority women.

Both of these books conclude their narratives at a time that is significant for their topics. Demick’s finishes right as international adoptions are ceasing in China, while Hong Fincher’s ends just as China is loosening its pandemic restrictions. But neither story is over. Chinese adoptees like Esther and her twin sister Shuangjie are still young, with much of their adult years still ahead of them, while other single, independent women fight for their autonomy and resist the pressure to marry early or at all.

China’s population has recently decreased for the first time since the famines of the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–62), yet there are 35 million more single men in China than women. These two books are also timely because they reflect upon the growing danger to women’s rights, not merely in China but around the world. In recent years, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have announced that women in their respective countries should be patriotic and have more children, while in the United States, abortion rights have been and continue to be severely cut back since Roe v. Wade (1973) was overturned in 2022. These books have arrived at a moment that marks “an ominous picture for the future of women’s reproductive rights,” indeed.