DAUGHTERS OF THE BAMBOO GROVE: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, by Barbara Demick

《竹林女儿——从中国到美国，关于绑架、收养和失散双胞胎的真实故事》，芭芭拉·德米克 著(DAUGHTERS OF THE BAMBOO GROVE: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, by Barbara Demick)

The men who came to snatch the toddler were from an agency known as Jisheng Ban: Family Planning.

前来抢走孩子的男人来自一个名为“计生办”的机构。

The child’s aunt was home alone with her on the late-spring morning when the intruders began flooding through her door. Her village, amid the rice paddies and pomelo orchards of China’s Hunan Province, was isolated. But now the outside world threatened.

在那个晚春的早晨，当闯入者涌进家门的时候，孩子的姑姑独自在家带孩子。村子坐落在中国湖南，四周是稻田和柚树林，这里本来与世隔绝，如今却遭到了来自外部世界的威胁。

Some of the assailants held the woman’s arms and legs; others ripped the 21-month-old’s grip from the hem of her shirt. The men then climbed into a waiting car with the child and sped away.

其中几哥人按住了女人的手脚，其他人把21个月大的孩子紧抓着她衬衫下摆的小手掰开。这群男子随后抱着孩子钻进一辆等候的汽车，扬长而去。

The story of the stolen child — known as Fangfang as an infant and Esther as an adult — is the subject of Barbara Demick’s entrancing and disturbing new book, “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.” It follows the girl’s grotesque odyssey from a Chinese orphanage, to which she was brought by the human traffickers, to the home of the evangelical Christian family in Texas who adopted her. To make matters even more dramatic, the girl eventually came to discover that she had an identical twin sister who’d been raised by her birth parents back in China.

这名被掳走的孩子小时候叫芳芳，长大后叫做艾丝特，芭芭拉·德米克这本引人入胜又令人不安的新书《竹林女儿》讲述的就是她的故事。书中记录了她从中国孤儿院开始的离奇经历——她被人口贩子带进孤儿院，之后被美国得州一个福音派基督徒家庭收养。更为戏剧性的是，她后来发现自己在中国还有一个同卵双胞胎妹妹，由亲生父母抚养长大。

Demick, a former foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and author of several other books, including the National Book Award finalist “Nothing to Envy,” about North Korean defectors, is one of our finest chroniclers of East Asia. She hammers together strong, solid sentence after strong, solid sentence — until the grandeur of the architecture comes into focus.

曾任《洛杉矶时报》驻外记者的德米克是一位杰出的东亚纪实作家，著有多部作品，包括入围美国国家图书奖的关于朝鲜脱北者的《我们最幸福》(Nothing to Envy)。她斟酌出一个又一个坚实有力的句子，直到整部作品如同宏伟建筑般清晰显现。

Demick’s characters are richly drawn, and her stories, often reported over a span of years, deliver a rare emotional wallop. It is impossible to forget, for instance, the young lovers in her North Korea book who look forward to power outages so that they can spend time alone together in the dark.

她笔下的人物栩栩如生，许多故事都是多年深度采访的成果，能带来罕见的情感冲击。比如，在她的《我们最幸福》中，那对期盼着停电以便能在黑暗中独处的年轻恋人让人难以忘怀。

This book, too, will inspire strong feelings. Its backdrop and context are China’s ambitious and misguided attempts to limit family size — referred to, somewhat misleadingly, as its “one-child” policies.

而这本新书也必然会激起强烈的情感。故事的背景是中国为了控制人口增长而推行的雄心勃勃却误入歧途的尝试，即所谓的“独生子女政策”，但这个说法在某种程度上是有误导性的。

Starting in 1979, and continuing for the next 36 years, Chinese authorities policed the most intimate of activities — procreation — sometimes through brutal tactics including forced sterilization, late-term abortions using formaldehyde syringes, vandalism of violators’ property and even kidnapping. Monitors who kept track of women’s menstrual cycles were derided as the “period police.” By one estimate, around 83 million Chinese worked in some capacity for Family Planning units by the 1990s.

从1979年开始的36年里，中国当局对最私密的行为——生育——采取管控措施，有时手段极其野蛮，包括强制绝育、注射甲醛进行晚期引产、破坏违规者的财产，甚至绑架。那些追踪女性月经周期的监督员被嘲讽为“月经警察”。据一项估计，到20世纪90年代，约有8300万中国人以某种身份为计划生育部门工作过。

Human rights advocates sounded the alarms. American evangelicals, in particular, viewed the initiatives through the prism of domestic abortion politics. Opponents chafed at traditional Chinese society’s preference for male children, who were relied upon to provide for their parents in old age. (Tellingly, a common girl’s name in China is Yaodi, which means “want little brother.”)

人权组织对此发出了警告。美国的福音派基督徒尤为关注，他们从美国国内的堕胎政治视角审视中国的计划生育。反对者也批评中国传统社会重男轻女的观念，因为儿子被视为赡养父母的保障。（很说明问题的一点是，在中国，“要弟”是一个常见的女孩名字。）

In a widely circulated incident in 1983, a Chinese father, hoping for a son, threw his daughter down a well as she screamed, “Baba!” The episode outraged Americans, spurring some activists — including the parents who raised Fangfang — to adopt Chinese children as a form of rescue. “What God does to us spiritually,” “he expects us to do to orphans physically,” the megachurch pastor Rick Warren declared, “be born again and adopted.”

在1983年的一桩广为流传的事件中，一名中国父亲因渴望生儿子，将女儿扔进井里，当时女孩还尖叫着“爸爸！”。这一事件激怒了美国人，促使一些活动人士——包括抚养芳芳的父母在内——通过收养中国儿童来进行“拯救”。巨型教会牧师华理克(Rick Warren)宣称：“上帝在精神上如何造就我们，他就期望我们在肉体上如何对待孤儿——重生并收养。”

There is plenty to be appalled by in China’s enforcement. But the horror stories also have a way of feeding Cold War-style orientalism. The rescue narrative — civilized West, backward East — distorts a great deal. To start, China’s policies were themselves rooted in Western science and economics, as the scholar Susan Greenhalgh has shown: They were conceived by Chinese rocket scientists seeking to reduce its population and thus raise its G.D.P., making the nation more competitive in global markets as China liberalized. They were a product of capitalism as much as communism.

中国执行计划生育政策的过程中确有诸多令人震惊之处。但这些恐怖故事也在某种程度上助长了冷战式的东方主义。这种“拯救叙事”——文明的西方、落后的东方——严重扭曲了事实。学者葛苏珊(Susan Greenhalgh)已指出，中国的政策本身植根于西方科学与经济学：它由中国的“火箭科学家”们构想，旨在减少人口、提高GDP，从而在中国改革开放后增强国家在全球市场的竞争力。这些政策是共产主义的产物，但同样也是资本主义的产物。

This was certainly true when it came to the market for babies. In 1992, Beijing opened its doors to international adoptions, eventually fueling a black market for trafficked children. As a journalist working in China at the time, Demick was early to raise awareness of the problem. She wrote a story in 2009 headlined “Stolen Chinese Babies Supply Adoption Demand,” and then followed one lead after another until she was able to identify Fangfang’s family in Texas.

在婴儿市场方面，情况无疑正是如此。1992年，中国向国际收养开放大门，最终催生了贩卖儿童的黑市。作为当时在中国工作的记者，德米克较早意识到了这一问题。她在2009年撰写了一篇题为《被拐中国婴儿满足收养需求》的报道，随后沿着一条又一条线索追踪，最终锁定了住在得克萨斯州的芳芳的收养家庭。

Demick herself is a central participant in this drama. Initially, upon discovering the girl's identity, she had to sit on the news. The adoptive family, fearing the potential upheaval, did not want to talk, and Demick made the difficult decision to conceal the child’s exact whereabouts from the birth family. Years later, however, a member of the adoptive family sent Demick a tantalizing Facebook message; they were ready to discuss the case.

德米克本人也是这一事件的核心参与者。起初，在发现这个女孩的身份后，她不得不隐瞒消息。收养家庭担心可能引发的动荡，不愿谈及此事，德米克艰难地决定向女孩的原生家庭隐瞒她的确切下落。然而，多年后，收养家庭的一名成员给德米克发了一条诱人的Facebook消息：他们准备好谈论这件事了。

The twins ultimately reconnected, meeting up in video calls and later in China. But the encounters never feel wholly without tension. At one point the girl’s birth father asks her adoptive family, “How much did you pay for her?”

这对双胞胎最终重新取得联系，先是通过视频通话，后来在中国见面。但这些会面始终弥漫着一丝紧张。有一次，女孩的亲生父亲问收养家庭：“你们花了多少钱买她？”

Demick is at her most coolly analytical when she writes in economic terms — including about herself. The essayist Joan Didion was once asked how it felt to encounter a 5-year-old child who was tripping on LSD as she reported one of her pieces. “Let me tell you,” Didion replied icily, “it was gold.” One has the sense, reading this book, that Demick knows she is in possession of gold. It is an extraordinary yarn, the kind reporters dream about.

从经济角度描述事件——包括描述她自己——的德米克会展现出最冷静的分析能力。散文家琼·狄迪恩曾被问及，在报道中遇到一个服用LSD后产生幻觉的五岁儿童是什么感受。“这么跟你说吧，”狄迪恩冷冷地答道，“就是挖到宝了。”读这本书时，能感觉到德米克知道自己挖到了宝。这是一个非凡的故事，是记者们梦寐以求的素材。

But journalists, too, are subject to the imperatives of production and consumption. “My finances weren’t flush,” Demick acknowledges at one point, calculating how much it would cost for her to reunite the girls herself. She persuades her editors to foot some of the bill; the price, of course, is that she will share the intimate details of their reunion with the world.

但记者也受制于创作与传播的需求。“我的经济状况并不宽裕，”德米克在某个时刻承认，她在盘算自己出面让这对女孩团聚需要多少费用。她说服编辑承担部分费用；当然，代价是她要将姐妹重逢的私密细节公之于众。

If there is a flaw in this excellent book it is only that the story of a single family — even, and perhaps especially, a story as dramatic as this one — is not a great vehicle for understanding Chinese family-planning policies as a whole. The initiatives, spread over three and a half decades, were too diverse, varying from region to region and time to time, to be grasped through a single sensational experience of this kind.

这本出色的书若说有什么瑕疵，那就是单个家庭的故事——即便（或许尤其是）像这样如此戏剧性的故事——并非理解中国计划生育政策整体的理想途径。这些政策推行了35年，内容繁杂，且因地区和时间的不同而存在差异，难以通过这样一个轰动的个案来全面理解。

Fortunately, Demick resists the impulse to tie things up in a neat bow. She leaves us uncertain about who is better off — the twin raised in China or the girl who grew up in Texas. That sense of uneasiness, born of an impossible desire for something whole, is a hallmark of Demick’s work.

幸运的是，德米克没有强行给出一个圆满的结局。她让我们始终无法确定，两姐妹究竟谁过上了更好的生活——是在中国长大的女孩，还是在得克萨斯州长大的女孩。这种源于对完美圆满怀着不切实际向往的不安感，是德米克作品的一大特点。

We long to be part of families and nations and churches — part of something larger than ourselves. But American or Chinese, we live in a market-driven, hyper-individualistic world. In a way, we are all orphans in exile.

我们渴望成为家庭、国家和教会的一员——成为比自身更宏大的事物的一部分。但无论美国人还是中国人，我们都生活在一个由市场驱动、高度个人主义的世界里。从某种意义上说，我们都是流亡的孤儿。

DAUGHTERS OF THE BAMBOO GROVE: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins | By Barbara Demick | Random House | 342 pp. | $32

《竹林女儿——从中国到美国，关于绑架、收养和失散双胞胎的真实故事》| 芭芭拉·德米克 著 | 兰登书屋 | 342页 | 32美元