A reporter helped them find her
“Why don’t you adopt one?” her husband joked. “I think I will,” Marsha replied. Her focus shifted to China after hearing about girls abandoned by parents who wanted sons. She kept replaying in her head a scene she’d read in a magazine about a 2-year-old girl crying “No, Daddy!” as her father threw her down a well.
“I cried whenever I thought about that girl,” she said. “I knew we had to adopt from China.”
They took out a loan to adopt and went to China in 1999 for their first daughter, Victoria, and then returned in 2002 for the girl they named Esther Elizabeth after her grandmothers. Marsha was happy to be paired with a toddler since she herself was older. Still, she was surprised to be greeted by a fully formed human, walking and talking with a personality in her own right. And she was slower to bond, shaking her head “no” when Marsha told her she was now her mother.
“It almost seems like she was raised by a family,” Marsha remembered her husband commenting.
Once in Texas, the girl acclimated quickly. She seemed to learn English within days. Marsha showed me a video of Esther and Victoria, hosting make-believe tea parties, singing to Disney songs, appearing in Christmas pageants.
“It was a fairy-tale childhood,” Victoria told me.
Disaster struck in 2007 when Al was diagnosed with lymphoma. With medical bills mounting, they moved into the manufactured home.
It was less than a year after Al’s death that Marsha received an email from the moderator of the adoptees forum with a link to my story. The moment she clicked on the article and photo, she knew. (“I didn’t need a DNA test. I was sure,” she later told me.)
Marsha was horrified that the baby she thought she’d rescued had in fact been stolen, and she was concerned about how her daughters, grieving their father’s death, would react. She tried to keep it secret. But one afternoon when she was napping, the 9-yearold Esther, always precocious, discovered an email that referred to a missing twin.
“Mom, I’m the twin, aren’t I?” she asked. “Does this mean I have to go back to China?”
The revelation triggered a wave of anxiety in the family. Although she knew Esther couldn’t be taken away at this age, Marsha was fearful. She built a privacy fence around the house. Victoria became ever more protective of her little sister, avoiding saying her name in public — she still refers to Esther as “E”— and watching over her shoulder for somebody who might snatch her.
Over time, though, their curiosity won out over their fear. Around age 12, Esther recalled, she became aware that nobody else in her town looked like her. “I started following Asian fashion bloggers, looking at Asian models and celebrities who were more my size and body type,” Esther said.
She also developed a taste for Chinese food and, since there weren’t Chinese restaurants nearby, she learned to cook it herself.
And then Esther thought about her past in China, the 21⁄2 years of her life lost in the amnesia of early childhood. She told me she couldn’t remember anything at all, not a word of the language she once spoke fluently. Like many adoptees, she wondered what her life would have been if she hadn’t been adopted; but unlike others, she knew there was a genetically identical version of herself half a world away.
I was helping Esther in my free time at my expense — perhaps to make amends for the pain my reporting had caused the family. I was uncertain I could ever write anything, given their desire for privacy. So I was surprised when Marsha agreed to travel to China with me and to let me tell their story. I helped with logistics and finances.
The trip took place in February 2019, around Chinese New Year, because it was the only time Shuang jie had more than a few days off work.
After reaching Changsha, a mega-city of 7 million, we headed south on a six-lane highway, eventually turning onto roads that got narrower as they ascended into mountains shrouded in rain clouds. The road was wet and plastered red with the wrapping of the spent fireworks set off for the holiday.
The rain blurred our vision. There are no street numbers in the mountains, and I wasn’t sure if I would recognize the Zeng family’s house, until I saw Shuang jie.
She stood alone in the middle of the road in a parka and pink suede boots. Now, more confident than I remembered her, she took charge of the situation. She peered into the back as though she knew that’s where Esther would be sitting.
Esther climbed out first. Shuang jie lightly touched her arm, to help her out.
“Esta,” she said softly, unable to pronounce the final syllable of her name.
The twins didn’t look directly at each other. They stood side by side, facing a photographer we had brought along. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. I imagined the twins as a bride and groom in an arranged marriage meeting for the first time.
Shuang jie ushered Esther into the house and into a dining area where a square table was laid out with a red tablecloth for New Year. An older sister poured hot water from a thermos into paper cups to warm us. There was no heat and we could see our breath.
I had envisioned tears, hugs, perhaps somebody fainting or even collapsing. That’s what happened when I covered a reunion of a birth family and adoptee years earlier. But histrionics were not in the style of the Zeng family.
Both of the birth parents hung back. The mother, Zanhua, hadn’t even come out to greet us. She remained in the kitchen cooking over a gas burner; after she carried out a half dozen porcelain bowls of chicken, rabbit, duck, beef (all slaughtered for the New Year), she said only, “Eat, eat before it gets cold.”
That first meal was like a formal banquet. Esther smiled politely, and with impeccable manners, thanked Shuang jie for making her feel welcome. She and Shuang jie stole glances at each other, but didn’t dare look each other straight in the eye.
We came back to the village every day for the rest of the week, taking seats at the square table. The Frederick family members became more adept with their chopsticks and more accustomed to spicy food. The Zeng family got used to Marsha praying at the beginning of every meal.
Shuangjie braided Esther’s hair. Marsha showed the Chinese family a photo album she had prepared of their life in Texas.
Esther was bursting with questions. I could tell that she was frustrated that she could not remember any of the dramatic events that took place in the first two years of her life.
To answer, Zanhua took her to the place where she was born. It was in a grove of bamboo and pomelo trees hidden away between the rice paddies. The labor had been easy — just a few hours — and Esther came out quickly, headfirst. But Shuangjie was a breach birth, smaller and weaker.
Zanhua had planned to leave her four girls with relatives so she and her husband could earn money in the city. This is a common arrangement among rural Chinese. But Shuang jie was still weak and colicky, and they needed to keep her with them.
We went to visit the aunt and uncle who had cared for Esther. The uncle, Yuan Guoxiong, a short, broad-shouldered man in a leather jacket with a cigarette dangling from his lip, looked suspiciously at Esther, as though she was an impostor. He then pushed aside her hair to inspect her ear. Seeing the telltale tag, he warmed up.
“It’s been 16 years since we’ve seen you,” he said, apologizing for his earlier reticence. “You are welcome.”
He and his wife reminisced about the girl they called Fangfang, a plump and precocious toddler. She could walk and talk when she was barely more than a year old, and knew her way around the village.
“She was really clever,” said the aunt, Zhou Xiuhua. “Everybody knew that. We think that’s why family planning was after her.”
The one-child policy had given rise to a family planning apparatus that was as powerful as the police. They could demolish houses and lock up people who’d had excess births and couldn’t pay the fines. They weren’t allowed to take away babies, but sometimes they did.
Babies had become a lucrative commodity. Foreign families had to donate $3,000 in cash to orphanages. The money was used to fund social services locally, but sometimes it lined officials’ pockets.
The twins’ family suspects family planning officials were tipped off by the midwife who delivered the girls. Officials frequently visited the home of the uncle and aunt. Usually the family saw them coming and escaped with the baby through a back window into the fields. But one warm day in 2002, when the doors were wide open to air out the house, the officials caught them by surprise.
Xiuhua said the men barged into the house and grabbed Fangfang. The girl wrapped her arms around her aunt’s legs, screaming.
“There were five big men. One held my arms behind my back. One held my legs,” recalled Xiuhua, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I couldn’t do anything. They took Fangfang and threw her into a car. I tried to run after them, but I was barefoot.”
Family planning officials demanded varying sums of money in return for the baby, settling for the equivalent of about $1,000. The aunt and uncle borrowed money from neighbors, but then family planning asked for more, which they didn’t have. With mobile telephones rarer then than now among migrant workers, they couldn’t reach the girls’ parents, who were working 450 miles away.
By the time the birth parents returned to attend a funeral, it was too late. Fangfang had been taken to the orphanage, and family planning said she’d been sent away.
“We always wanted to find you,” her father told Esther. “But it seemed impossible.”
But then, a glimmer of hope. The family consulted a fortuneteller who told them that one day they would see their missing daughter again.
After four days in the village, Esther’s adoptive and birth families felt as bonded as they could for people who don’t share a language and culture. Esther held hands with her birth parents and sisters. Zanhua hugged Marsha, in contrast to the first day, when she pulled away when Marsha attempted a hug. Esther’s birth sisters embraced Victoria. The families posed for dozens of photographs.
Marsha gave the speech that she had in effect practiced for nearly 10 years, ever since she found out Esther had been stolen from her family. “Esther’s name means star. She has been a bright star in my life,” she began. “But I would never have adopted her if I knew she was stolen from you. It gives me pain knowing that my gain was your loss.”
The father, Youdong, in turn offered profuse thanks to Marsha.
“I am grateful to you. I can see that you raised her very well.”
Esther promised her birth parents she would visit again and that, if she married, she would bring her husband and children to meet them. Everyone beamed.
As we were leaving the village, Zanhua took me aside and said that during my first visit in 2009, I promised that I would return and bring their daughter. I told her I didn’t remember any such promise and doubted I would have made it. But I appreciated her gratitude just the same.
Shuang jie rode back with us to Changsha, and in the relative privacy of the backseat, she and Esther bombarded each other with questions. “Do you have a boyfriend?” was one of the first. Neither did. Neither seemed keen on getting married too soon.
They taught each other words in their respective languages — Happy New Year, hair, food, sisters. When the interpreter got exhausted from the effort, they turned to a translation app on Shuangjie’s smartphone. But for the most part they communicated as they had before, through gestures and games. They played cards and pat-a-cake clapping games, in effect living the childhood denied them. They reveled in their similarities (both are adept at rolling their tongues). “There is another me out there in the world,” Shuang jie exclaimed with delight.
Both cried when it was time for Esther to go. And yet I had the sense this was not an end, but a beginning.
Nearly 150,000 children have been adopted from China since 1992, 96,000 of them Americans, mostly girls. Thousands have returned to China to learn about their origins and search their birth families. Perhaps a few dozen have succeeded. Often, though, the relationship between adoptees and their birth parents is complicated by misunderstandings and recriminations. It struck me it was easier for Esther to bond with her birth parents because of the way she had been seized. And she had Shuangjie.
When I saw Esther a few months after the reunion, she was starting to teach herself Chinese from websites and library books.
And she was planning for their next reunion. “Shuang jie doesn’t like burgers. I’m thinking about what I should cook for her.”
‘Esther’s name means star. She has been a bright star in my life. I would never have adopted her if I knew she was stolen from you. It gives me pain knowing that my gain was your loss.’ — Marsha Frederick, Esther’s adoptive mother