When China’s government introduced the one-child policy in 1980 with the stated goal of curbing the population to increase national prosperity, it had many unintended consequences — sex-selection abortion, infanticide and forced sterilization. It also triggered a rise in overseas adoption, as parents in China’s highly patriarchal society gave away daughters in the hope that their next child would be a boy. Jean Kwok explores the human toll of this now-defunct policy in her fourth novel, “The Leftover Woman,” through the intertwined stories of two mothers: Jasmine, an undocumented Chinese immigrant searching for her daughter, and Rebecca, an ambitious White book editor.

The novel opens with Jasmine struggling to find a job in New York City. Several years after her abusive partner, Wen, a powerful government official, told her their daughter had died at birth, Jasmine discovered that he had actually arranged the extralegal adoption of the child by an American couple in New York. Escaping Wen’s clutches, Jasmine has fled to the United States with a plan to find her daughter. She determinedly makes her way in the unfriendly city, erasing herself to blend into the background when possible and forcing herself to use her looks to get a job as a cocktail waitress in a strip club.

In contrast to Jasmine, Rebecca has wealth, pedigree, a top position in a legacy publishing house, a handsome husband and a daughter, Fiona, whom the couple adopted from China after failed fertility treatments. Fiona is sweet and adorable, but is attached to her awkward, unkempt and dowdy Chinese nanny, Lucy, in a way that arouses Rebecca’s jealousy.

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Alternating between the perspectives of Jasmine and Rebecca, the story is propelled by secrets and lies. While Jasmine’s voice tends toward the flowery and sentimental, Rebecca’s is self-involved and uptight. Obsessed with appearances and propriety, threatened by the smallest of social embarrassments, shallow Rebecca is a disquieting portrait of a literary editor who has the power to shape the publishing landscape. For her, the merits of an actual book are secondary to an author’s designer clothes and facial structure that “would look fabulous on the Today show.”

Given the two-dimensional characters, it is the plot that drives this novel: There are several clever twists (plus a few clumsy ones) that unite Rebecca and Jasmine. The language is plush, at times lyrical, though the momentum can get bogged down in detailed descriptions of the characters’ every emotion and the many glances, facial expressions and jaw-clenches of their social interactions.

But it is on the subjects of race and Asian representation that Kwok, an immigrant herself, disappoints the most. Kwok caters to stereotypes, reducing most of her Chinese characters to English names, and only first names at that. Jasmine is particularly underdeveloped — despite a rural upbringing and limited English, she experiences no culture shock as she deftly navigates New York. And the book’s tidy, bow-tied ending endorses transracial adoption as the best choice for the child, even when that child has been abducted from her mother.

As the Chinese government discovered with the one-child policy, a false narrative can have unimagined consequences. Transracial adoptees know that their stories are too complicated for fairy-tale endings.

Alice Stephens is the author of the novel “Famous Adopted People.”

The Leftover Woman

By Jean Kwok

William Morrow. 288 pp. $30

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