Chinese birth tourism: pregnant women in California’s ‘maternity hotels’ given voice in empowering novel
Vanessa Hua’s A River of Stars explores the immigrant experience in the US from a new perspective, taking the reader inside maternity boarding houses where myriad characters, each with their own reason for being there, exist
In 2011, journalist and writer Vanessa Hua was living in Claremont, California, pregnant with twins, when she heard about a local phenomenon. Throughout southern California, dozens of pregnant Chinese women, bellies heavy with imminent babies, were living together in shared homes.
The women were both boarders and patients in what were called “maternity hotels”– American houses where women from Taiwan and the mainland resided, typically from their sixth month of pregnancy until giving birth. The reason? So that they could deliver their children on United States soil, giving their precious progeny American citizenship.
The empire-waisted silhouettes and heaving, swollen breasts of these women hardly went unnoticed. “Neighbours were asking why so many expectant Chinese women were coming and going into suburban homes,” Hua recalls from news accounts. “It sounded like a brothel in reverse.”
Living a parallel existence, with her own two sons on their way, Hua began to ponder what these women’s lives were like. “When I was pregnant, I found that people treated me very generously, offering me a place at the front of the line, or giving up their seat,” she says. “They asked me when I was due, if I was having a boy or a girl, and shared stories about their families.” That started her thinking about what being pregnant and alone among a dozen or so similarly pregnant, alone and wildly hormonal women might be like. “Who would be the queen bee?” Hua asked herself. “It seems like a situation ripe for drama – and comedy.”
Hua stumbled on a newspaper story about one of the maternity hotel residents who evidently knocked on the door of a neighbour, asking for something to eat. “It made me realise that these mothers-to-be may have felt trapped,” she says. That’s when Hua put on her fiction writer’s hat and started imagining a pregnant character who wanted to escape, who didn’t get along with the other clients – a feisty underdog who did not allow impending motherhood to dull her survivor’s instincts. Maybe, she reasoned, this character was even ambivalent about becoming a mother.
Hua sat down and wrote about this maternity hotel captive. She named the character Scarlett, and the first scene that came out was of this scrappy, lower-class woman engaged in an all-out cat fight with a snooty maternity hotel client, nicknamed Lady Yu. “From that moment, Scarlett’s character grew,” says Hua, who, in addition to writing news articles, has penned a collection of short stories, Deceit and Other Possibilities (2016). (O, The Oprah Magazine, called the collection “searing”.)
