2. Home, before home

The podcast explores the impact of China's One Child Policy on the host Eva Brookes, a transracial adoptee, and women in China. It examines the policy's origins in the Great Leap Forward famine and its goals of economic stability and population control. The discussion reveals the policy's unintended consequences, including a gender imbalance and a preference for sons rooted in Confucian values. Sociologist Jieyu Liu discusses the pressures faced by women, caught between state and family expectations. Barbara Demick, a journalist, sheds light on the shift in adoption trends around 2000, revealing a move from abandonment to a market for trafficking babies due to increased wealth in rural China and orphanages' reliance on adoption money. Ultimately, Eva seeks to understand her birth mother's life and decision within this complex system.