She told The Front Page the book acts as more than one family’s tragedy. It’s also an account of how state policy reshaped private life, family structure and identity in China.
“This came out of my reporting in China, starting in 2007. I spent seven years in China as a bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and I had started hearing rumours that were just trickling out on Chinese social media, with people complaining that their kids had been taken.
“These were complaints coming from very, very rural villages. Places that we would normally never get to hear anything about.
“This was the dawning of Chinese social media, so I went out to investigate and started talking to parents in really very remote places. These were villages that you had to reach by hiking up a goat path or wading across a rice paddy. But, in these remote places, people were having their kids taken away by family planning officials – the agency that enforced China’s so-called one-child policy,” she said.
The book traverses the brutality and reach of the one-child policy, showing how officials used forced abortions, fines, property confiscation and child removal to enforce compliance.
It epitomises the hurt and confusion of families whose children were taken from them and the deliberate distribution of myths about why these children were put up for international adoption.
Western views of baby girls as “unwanted kittens” needing to be saved were a far cry from how many were separated from their birth parents – some of whom have subsequently spent decades trying to find their child.
Demick recalls a father’s 20-year search for his daughter.
“He spent more than two decades looking for her... he used to call my office every week to see if I could help. He spoke in this very heavy dialect, and he wasn’t educated, but he was persistent, and he was smart. He knew that what happened to him was unfair.
“There were many who lost their children who really didn’t give up. And interestingly, several of those people I met who were seeking lost daughters already had sons.
“So, this whole stereotype of only wanting boys was not really true,” she said.
The father eventually found his daughter after submitting his DNA to the ancestry website 23andMe. She turned out to be a young college student living in Indiana, United States.
China’s one-child policy was not formally abolished until 2015.
Barbara Demick will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival, May 12-17. For more information and tickets, visit www.writersfestival.co.nz.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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