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The Jacob Shapiro Podcast

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast

The Geography of a Missing Daughter

Dec 2, 2025 · 53m

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About this episode

Book episode! What happens when a policy meant to shape a nation reaches into the most intimate corners of a family’s life? Journalist Barbara Demick's Daughters of the Bamboo Grove becomes a prism for a China where babies vanish, families fracture, and two identical lives grow up worlds apart. One twin speaks Mandarin, the other English. One hides in a bamboo grove; the other lands in Texas. Demick joins The Jacob Shapiro Show to explore the lives shaped, and misshaped, by China's restrictive one-child policy. Shapiro and Demick probe the emotional aftershocks of separation, the uneasy collision of two cultures when twins are reunited across continents, and the moral ambiguity of…