Barbara Demick Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2025?   

Daunting. I started out as a daily newspaper reporter covering cops and city council meetings. I'm the same person. Although I've been longlisted before by the Baillie Gifford, it feels strange to think of myself as a real writer, no less an author.

What inspired you to write Daughters of the Bamboo Grove? 

Books about adoption are usually written from the standpoint of the adoptive parents or the adoptees, who then search backward for clues to their identities. I wanted to tell this story in the proper way, starting even before conception, looking at the society and the birth parents that produced this child. 

What do you hope readers will take away from your book? 

I want readers to understand the forces, political and social, that compelled Chinese birth parents to relinquish their daughters. They shouldn't demonize them. The story also lends perspective to discussions about immigration. You have the separated twins, genetically identically humans, except that one is American and the other Chinese. There is an element of randomness that shaped their identities, as it does all of us.

What drew you to this particular story of separated twins, and how did you first become involved in their journey? 

It's funny. I didn't set out to write this book. The book found me.

It started in 2009 when I was traipsing around the most remote parts of China, hiking up goat paths, forging streams, meeting families whose babies were taken away by officials because they couldn't pay the fines for violating the one child policy. I interviewed this family who lost a twin daughter, and afterwards, somewhat to my surprise, I was able to track her down in Texas. At that time, I couldn't write anything because it seemed unethical to expose a young girl as being a stolen child. But years later, the adoptive family contacted me, asking for help connecting her with her twin. One thing led to another. I just kept getting sucked deeper into the story.

How did your years of reporting in China shape the way you approached this narrative? 

Oddly, I think I understood the Chinese family better than the Americans. I had been reporting in China long enough that I appreciated the predicament they faced under the one-child policy. I was able to approach them without judging. As a result, they trusted me and opened up.

To a writer, what does long-form long (non) fiction offer compared to your other journalistic work? 

I think narrative nonfiction is the most challenging genre for writers. This is not like fiction or even memoir. The writer needs to extract from the subject accurate dialogue and minute detail, down to what people were wearing and their facial expressions, the tapping of foot, the flicking of a hand. But it has to be real. You can't make it up. I use the same standards in my books as I was taught as a reporter. We had ethics training that was very strict-- no composite characters, no altering quotes. All the detail should stand up to rigorous fact-checking. 

Were there moments when the emotional intensity of the story made it difficult to write?

The emotional intensity came about from my relationship with the people in the book. I became very close to them. I wanted to tell their story accurately while making sure no harm would come to them. I worried that the Chinese family could be harassed by local officials. I didn't want to invade the privacy of the twins with too many intimate questions. This would have been a much easier book if it were fictionalized.

If you could describe your book in three words, what would they be?  

Just one word. Identity. It's all about how our identity is shaped.