An identical twin sister lost, found and, at long last, home
In 2002 a child was stolen. Her family in China waited for her
On a cold afternoon in 2017, I was fighting off the urge for a nap when a message popped up on Facebook:
Ms. Demick. You contacted me a long time ago? Are you still interested in talking with me? If so, my family and I are interested.
I was the New York correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and was exhausted from covering the aftermath of the presidential inauguration. I tapped out a curt reply, saying I didn’t know who he was.
My mom adopted a little Chinese girl years ago … and it appears like she has a twin sister still in China. I bolted upright. Of course I hadn’t forgotten.
In 2009, as a Beijing-based correspondent, I traveled the backwaters of central China to learn more about the origins of the more than 80,000 girls who had been adopted in the United States.
The prevailing wisdom was that rural Chinese had essentially thrown away their female babies because the law limited them to one child and they preferred boys. No doubt that was often the case. But reports were surfacing that government officials were snatching babies to satisfy a lucrative adoption market.
I went to investigate, traveling to remote mountain villages, sometimes leaving the car to hike because the roads were impassible.
One of the families I met in a village wedged between rice paddies in Hunan province had lost
one of their twin daughters. Twins are normally permitted, but this family already had two older daughters.
The mother had given birth in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government. She and her husband then fled to another province with one twin while leaving the other with an uncle and aunt. But one day when the girls were almost 2 years old, five men working for family planning stormed the house, restrained the aunt and took away the screaming toddler.
I met the twin who stayed with her parents when she was 9 years old. Her name was Shuang jie — “double purity,” in recognition of her status as a twin. She had a heart-shaped face and a pouting mouth, lips turned downward to mark her discontent. She sat next to her mother on a plastic stool outside a wooden shack.
Her mother, Yuan Zanhua, told me her daughter still grieved for her missing twin. “‘She’s always asking me, ‘When will you get my sister back? Where is she?’ ”
Zanhua thought her daughter might have been adopted overseas, but she’d also heard rumors that babies were taken for organ donations. (I never found evidence to support such claims. In fact, parents from the U.S., Netherlands, Spain and Britain were flocking to China to adopt.)
“She could be anywhere in the world,” Zanhua told me. “I wouldn’t know where to look.”
As I got ready to leave, she brightened up for a final farewell.
“Come visit again, and next time bring our daughter.”
My story on officials abducting babies ran in September 2009 along with a story about the stolen twin. I moved on to other news, but Zanhua had laid down a challenge that would be hard to resist. I began to search.
Eventually, I found a Yahoo chat group for parents who had adopted from the Shaoyang Social Welfare Institute, the orphanage where I was certain the twin had been taken. Along with the concerned moderator, who let me join the group, we flipped through photos and descriptions. One girl looked like a possibility. The parents were evangelical Christians who had two adopted girls. They were an older couple, both previously married with children.
On Adopt the World, a website she created to help families adopt, the mother explained how their faith guided them: “When God births His passion in you, it doesn’t matter what the obstacles are.… It had to be because it was and is His will. God loves the orphan. God defends the orphan. God is a Father to the orphan, and is just waiting for us to care for them the way He does.”
On the website were two photos of the girl I suspected was the missing twin — a blurry head shot of a toddler with thin hair and downcast eyes, another of a smiling 4-year-old in a puffy blouse.
I didn’t want to raise false hopes for Shuang jie’s family, so I borrowed a technique from police procedurals — mug shots. I arranged the two photos on a page with random images of Chinese girls plucked from the internet. I mailed the page to Hunan, with an offhand note saying these were adopted girls and just maybe one resembled their daughter.
Within a day of receiving it, the family called my office. They’d picked out not one, but both photos as their missing daughter, who had been named Fangfang. They were certain.
I reached out to the American family, but it was quickly apparent they didn’t want to cooperate. As soon as they learned of my queries, they removed the photos from the internet.
I later learned that the adoptive father had died the year before at the age of 66. Through the obituary, I got the names of the couple’s adult children. I sent messages that went unreturned. The chat room moderator contacted me on behalf of the adoptive mother basically asking that we back off:
“She and her family are still deeply grieving her husband’s death and I don’t think she is ready or able to deal with this at present.”
This presented an ethical dilemma. Did I have an obligation to tell the Chinese birth parents where their daughter was? Did I owe it to the adoptive family to keep their privacy?
In the end, my editors and I were in agreement: It was out of the question to write a story that exposed a 9-year-old girl as being a stolen Chinese child. So I sent all the information I had gathered to the adoptive family. I told the birth parents that I believed their daughter was alive and well in the U.S., but couldn’t be contacted at that time. I didn’t hear back from them.
Meanwhile, the story of the stolen babies became a big scandal in China, threatening a billiondollar adoption industry. Many Chinese journalists traveled to Hunan to write about the missing twin and, from time to time, would contact me to ask for the whereabouts of the girl in the United States.
“The family says you know where the twin is but won’t tell them,” one journalist chastised me.
I continued to explore the issue, writing about a family that made a business trafficking baby girls and an obstetrician who stole babies. But I never revealed the name of the American twin. Not until now.
Her name is Esther Frederick. She lives on the outskirts of Fort Worth with her older adopted sister and her mother, Marsha Frederick. It was Marsha’s adult son from a previous marriage who had contacted me on Facebook.
Esther was now 16 and wanted to get in touch with her sister. The family trusted me because I’d kept their secret for eight years. Now they wondered: Could I help?
So began a gradual process. A filmmaker working on a documentary about Chinese family planning finally gave me the contact information on WeChat, a messaging app, for Zeng Shuangjie.
Since Shuang jie didn’t speak much English, and Esther remembered not a word of Chinese, I became their courier, sending and translating messages between them.
“Dear Shuangjie,” the first letter began. “I’m Esther. Please allow me to introduce myself.”
Esther explained that she had just completed her high school studies (she had been homeschooled and was living at home). She was starting her own photography business. Just to avoid raising expectations that she’d move back to China, Esther added a pointed rejoinder: “I am very happy and want you to know that I have a caring and lovely family whom I love dearly.”
Shuang jie picked up immediately on Esther’s meaning.
“We very much want to see you and hope your family is not afraid,” she wrote back. “We won’t snatch you away from your family. We understand. I hope we will keep in touch in the future.”
The girls continued to exchange messages. Esther wrote of her interests — photography, art, baking, fashion. Shuang jie wrote of her own — badminton, pingpong, music and writing Chinese characters. They discussed favorite colors.
They were like pen pals without real intimacy, struggling to find common ground. Esther was still nervous about revealing too much of her identity.
After a few months of aimless electronic chitchat, the girls wanted to talk. I was on vacation in China and arranged to go through Hunan to set up a video chat.
Shuang jie by then was living in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, about a six-hour drive from her village. She had attended a vocational high school for teacher training and was working as a teacher’s aide in a kindergarten.
When we met at my hotel, I didn’t recognize the pouty little girl I’d interviewed in the bamboo forest. Her face was so broad that her cheekbones protruded like a boomerang, her smile stretching wide across. She was nervous and had brought a roommate for support.
Shuangjie took out her smartphone, and we dialed Texas.
Esther’s face popped up on the tiny screen. The girls stared at each other from 7,000 miles and 13 time zones apart.
For a long time, it seemed, they just looked at each other without speaking. Shuang jie had her mouth agape, a look of awe breaking into a smile.
“I’m so happy I can finally see you,” she finally said.
My Chinese colleague from The Times’ Beijing bureau translated into English.
“I can see you too,” Esther replied.
“You look so much like me,” Shuang jie said. Esther made a joke. “I was going to put on makeup but I figured you already know what I look like.”
It was a disjointed conversation, all the more awkward by the need for the interpreter. The girls related best through gestures. Esther held up her waist-length hair and pulled it back to look more like Shuang jie. Shuang jie showed Esther a birthmark on her back, which Esther lacks. The dialogue was often lost in translation and in culture.
They discussed their birthday. Shuang jie said they were born Aug. 9, but that was by the lunar calendar used in rural China; it took some back and forth to confirm the date: Sept. 6, 2000.
The girls discovered they both suffered from nosebleeds, although Esther had allergies — to dust and soy, among others. Shuang jie did not. Esther loved to swim; Shuang jie, like many rural Chinese, never learned to swim. They both liked art and design.
The girls’ birth mother had told me she didn’t know whether they were identical or fraternal twins. The firstborn, Fangfang, was larger and healthier and had a small fleshy tag on one ear that helped them tell the babies apart. A DNA test would later find a “99.9999% probability” that they were identical.
Esther seemed more confident. She spoke with a bright, chipper voice that sounded more California than Texas and had a stereotypical American “can-do” attitude. She was a talented photographer and was getting assignments through a Christian website to shoot weddings. She wore makeup, feminine clothing and appeared older than Shuang jie.
Shuang jie was more self-effacing. Birth order matters in Chinese culture, and she was youngest of the four daughters in a society that praised boys. Although she was the best student in her family, her scores weren’t quite high enough for university.
One would have expected Esther to be larger, having been so at birth and growing up in Texas, but it was just the opposite. Shuang jie is a good 2 inches taller, which I could only attribute to the seven months Esther spent in the orphanage.
As I got to know the girls and their families better, I realized many of my preconceptions about Chinese and American culture were simply wrong. After the video chat, we took a car from Changsha to a village called Gaofeng — literally “High Phoenix” — where Shuang jie’s family built a house with their earnings from migrant labor. It was three stories of red brick, with white Juliet balconies looking over the rice paddies. The house had an unfinished quality, and chickens strutted through the dining room. But it was a big step up from the log cabin where they were living in 2009.
Zeng Youdong, the twins’ father, came out to greet me wearing a crisp polo shirt. He was a slight, wiry man with boyish wisps of mustache on either side of his mouth, and he spoke softly and deliberately.
He told me his father had been pressuring them to have a boy — in keeping with rural tradition in which the family line is continued through men. His family had lived in Gaofeng for hundreds of years, and it was the men who tended the graves in the family cemetery. When the twins were born, he was pleased to be defying the expectations. “I was so happy when they were born. I couldn’t stop laughing.” On my laptop I called up photos Esther had sent from Texas. He couldn’t peel his eyes away. He just kept staring with a quiet grin at the girl with long shiny hair tossed over one side of her forehead. “You should tell her not to be afraid,” he said. “I understand she is not coming back to live in China. Just to see her makes me happy.”
In early 2018, I met Esther and her family at their manufactured home, which is tucked down a quiet cul-de-sac. It was a fraction the size of the Zeng family house, but it was cozy and immaculate with wall-to-wall carpeting, shelves of books, most of them Christian, and a calico cat sprawled underfoot.
Marsha answered the door, while Esther ducked around a corner, shyer in person than I’d expected. Her long hair, tucked behind her ears, gave her a personal style that was quite unlike Shuang jie. But the way she walked, the shape of her lips when she smiled and spoke, was the same as her sister, even though a different language emerged.
Marsha did most of the talking and the words came spilling out. I’d been anxious about meeting her, fearing that she would disapprove of me as a secular New Yorker, but it turned out we had much in common. We were both single mothers. She was a passionate reader with abiding interest in other cultures. As a girl, she’d thought she might work as a missionary abroad.
Instead, Marsha had married and divorced when she was barely out of high school and raised a son on her own. In her 40s, she met her second husband, Al Frederick, also divorced, when both worked at Lockheed in Fort Worth. They’d not intended to have children, but one day she heard a radio broadcast about the appalling conditions in Romanian orphanages.