The real story

Many of my readers know I prefer literary fiction to any other kind of literature. Every now and then, however, s subject is of such high interest that I’m compelled to turn to a book that tells the real story.

Such was the case a number of years ago when I read Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” Demick is the former bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul.

I had always been fascinated about life under the world’s most repressive totalitarian regime. Demick’s brilliant, scrupulously reported book follows the lives of six North Koreans, covering the 15 years that included the death of Kim-Il sung and his son’s rise to power. During that time a horrifying famine killed one-fifth of the country’s population. This book was a revelation.

Two books by Patrick Radden Keefe, the New Yorker staffer widely considered one of the today’s best non-fiction writers, are also at the top of my non-fiction reads over the past several years.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is the story of the violent sectarian conflict known as The Troubles through the lens of a single unsolved crime: the 1972 abduction and murder of a widowed mother by the IRA. Radden Keefe intertwines it with the stories of larger-than-life characters including former Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams and the Price sisters, prominent Provisional IRA members from Belfast, known for their involvement in the 1973 London car bombings and subsequent hunger strike.

It’s a fascinating complex subject that Radden Keefe brings alive in clearly-written, highly descriptive prose.

Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty examines the Sackler family and the devastating consequence of the manufacturing of the painkiller OxyContin by Purdue Pharma. There are true villains in this story.

And finally, there’s Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions. It’s a memoir about his childhood friend, a brilliant Yale graduate, whose life unraveled due to paranoid schizophrenia, culminating in the murder of his fiancé. The book examines the many aspects of friendship, mental illness, and the misguided societal and institutional failures in understanding and treating madness resulting in tragedy. It’s a chilling story.

Now comes Demick with a new book Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins.”

Reported over a span of years, Demick chronicles the story of twins separated in early childhood by China’s barbaric one -child policy(1979 to 2015), designed to curb rapid population growth, fearing it would hinder economic development, strain resources, and prevent improvements in living standards after the famines of the 1960s.

Girl babies, considered worthless primarily due to deeply rooted patriarchal, patrilineal, and economic factors, were savagely stolen by government-sanctioned “Family Planning” officials, some infants literally torn from their mothers’ arms, and sent to orphanages and, ultimately, families outside the country. Forced sterilizations and abortions using formaldehyde syringes were other methods used as a part of population control. There was substantial evidence of trafficking involving massive amounts of money for “facilitating” these adoptions.

Demick tells the story of twin girls, born in a mountainous village in Hunan province, the third and fourth children in their family. Fearful of the local family planning office, the twins’ parents worried that they would be caught and punished for having more than one child. They already had a second daughter after their first was born, but they worried they would have a difficult time evading attention with twins. So, they sent one twin to live at her aunt and uncle’s home, where one of them was kidnapped and eventually adopted by a well-meaning couple in Texas.

The story becomes a one of true investigative journalism and something of a thriller with Demick in the key role in helping the families find each other. We come to know each family intimately and deeply empathize with their emotions.

I personally know a number of couples who adopted babies from China, believing the Chinese government lies that the children had been abandoned and they were rescuing” them. When the adoptive mother in this story learns the truth of the circumstances surrounding her child’s “abandonment,” her reaction is one of shock and grief.

I’ll leave it to you to discover the details of the twin sisters’ reunion, which is complicated and not at all predictable.

Demick’s book ends with the irony of China’s population today shrinking to an alarming degree…now China desperately needs population growth and is providing incentives for having babies.

Among the many factors that appeal to me about all the books mentioned is, in addition to superb reporting, each is written by a master storyteller. To my mind, too many non-fiction books are downright dull. Each contains a story, but too often it’s hidden behind a wall of facts. The ability to report all available facts within a compelling story is rare indeed.