Mother and son
In three and a half years at Asiaweek I had two bylined pieces. This was the first, published May 31, 1991, in a short-lived front-of-the-book section devoted to personal accounts.
I had my first hint of what was to come when my pregnant wife asked for a black-skinned chicken. I had seen one in Lima, Peru. A Chinese grocer proudly showed us birds that had been brought all the way from Guangdong province. He was breeding the chickens on his roof. They had odd, white-feathered legs and black feet—too scrawny for a proper meal. He said their meat was medicinal.
Since then we had moved to Hong Kong, a place foreign to me but home to my wife Annie. We wanted exciting jobs, a faster pace and a chance for her to be with her family after 15 years in the States. We had just learned she was pregnant with our first child. I wondered what it would be like to have this baby in Hong Kong—and what it meant that my wife wanted to eat a black-skinned chicken.
I had thought of her as Westernized. She had attended university in the States, built her career there and taken out U.S. citizenship. She considered herself part-American, and went into this pregnancy intending to do most things the American way. But she quickly found that her family, friends and co-workers had no such idea. She was Chinese. If she was unsure of the proper things for a pregnant woman to do, they would let her know.
She remembered black-skinned chickens from her youth. She had seen them eaten by expecting mothers. So she did the same. She went to the wet market, selected a live bird, and took home a plucked carcass that looked like it had been rolled in ash. She boiled it with ginger for a long time and drank the juice. She did it partly for the novelty. It was a rite of passage, something she had earned.
For her prenatal care, we chose a modern Chinese obstetrician who had an ultrasound scanner and up-market clientele. His advice: no drugs and no cigarettes. “And no Chinese herbs.” Annie could “eat like an English lady.” But from family and friends came contradictory rules: no shrimp or lobster. Shellfish would give the baby bad skin. No hot curry. Only a little ong choy. And definitely no mangoes. They would give the baby a skin rash.
I intended to be tolerant. But unborn babies injured by mangoes? Did my wife really believe that? To her, it was a matter of prudence: “Maybe it’s just old wives’ tales, and maybe there’s something to it. I don’t want to risk it.” It was the same with Indian curry: Spicy food was “bad for the baby.”
I argued back. “All these mangoes come from the Philippines. If they were bad for unborn babies, why don’t all the Filipinos have skin problems?” I thumbed through my Asiaweek. “And look here. There are 842 million Indians. How did there get to be so many, if curry interfered with childbearing?” But in this struggle, temptation worked better than logic. Annie loves mangoes. I bought a ripe one: “Try this.” When she ate it I was relieved. Later, we shared a plate of pungent Punjabi curry. But she didn’t eat very many of either, that year.
The Chinese, I discovered, had other customs about newborns. One is never to say good things, because they bring just the opposite. It’s safer to something negative, which everyone knows you don’t mean. The younger generation doesn’t do this much anymore, but old folks do. Mother to grandmother: “This is your naughty grandson.” Grandmother to mother: “Hit him.”
One custom that survives in Hong Kong is the pickling of pig’s knuckles and whole ginger in black vinegar. This concoction is begun before the birth, in a clay pot that barely fits on the stove. It takes a month to prepare, and people don’t bother to do it except on this one occasion. The output, a delicacy, looks like stones in motor oil.
Next is the red-eggs party. When the baby is one month old, the parents throw a banquet. They bring the infant, and on each table they set a plate of red-colored boiled eggs. Around his neck and wrists dangle golden baubles given by the family. Everyone passes red envelopes of cash—lai see—to the parents.
Modern red-eggs parties are held in big restaurants and hotels. The banquets are lavish, but little is left of the ritual. Decades ago the Chinese kept the baby swaddled in rags until the one-month party, when they dressed him up in scarlet robes. They also shaved his scalp, and hung a little mirror on his forehead to ward off evil spirits.
Another custom was that the mother didn’t wash her hair for the first month. In Hong Kong the practice still survives: The pillows in the maternity ward stink.
When Annie began breastfeeding, she was subject to more dietary rules. I brought her a bowl of wontons; a relative advised her not to eat them. Wontons had shrimp that would get in the milk and hurt the baby’s skin. Liver was bad, too. It would retract the milk. (Fish and papaya soup would stimulate it.) And when I brought her a cup of mango juice, colleagues visiting from her office warned her (in Chinese, so I wouldn’t understand it): “Don’t! You know better than that.”
I waited for our Chinese obstetrician to make his daily rounds. He had forbidden coffee and tea. How about mango juice? Would that hurt the baby?
He couldn’t believe I was asking this. “You mean feeding the baby mango?”
“No, feeding Annie. And that hurting the baby through the milk.”
“Absolutely not. Ridiculous.” The twinkle in his eye seemed to say, ‘I know what you’re up to.’ But his other patients believed these things, and also told Annie not to drink mango juice.
Day after day the food I brought my wife was being condemned as harmful. Only one said it in English. I had proposed buying a tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and she said: “You’d better not. It could be a rooster. What she needs is the meat of a hen. It’s milder.” I was getting sore, but Annie’s tolerance ran out first. Being torn between me and all her other visitors was too much. “I’m going to eat what I want,” she said. “Right now I want a cup of tea.”
I had my own ideas about how babies should be born. I should comfort my wife through her labor pains so that she wouldn’t need drugs. I should witness the delivery, and perhaps even cut the umbilical cord. The newborn should be placed at the mother’s breast. Afterward, the baby would be in her room, and be fed with mother’s own milk.
This was the “natural” way portrayed in all the books from Britain and the States. But in Hong Kong my ideas seemed oddly provincial. “Natural” is folkish, earthy and backward. It’s spitting on the ground and dressing your infant in slit pants instead of diapers. It’s what the peasants do across the fence in China. Peasants breastfeed; modern women use formula, which can be mixed by the Filipino maid. Few Hong Kong women nurse their infants, and they never do it in public.
I recalled some letters to the South China Morning Post in which a woman said that she had attempted to breastfeed her baby in the coffee shop of the Mandarin Hotel. The headwaiter ordered her out. She would have to feed the infant in the women’s toilets. “I was shocked and offended,” she wrote, describing public breastfeeding as something that “causes offense only to the uneducated and small-minded.” Of course, she was a foreigner.
The private Chinese hospital where our obstetrician sent us allowed a mother to hold her infant only if she was breastfeeding. Otherwise she could peek through a window for two minutes, and move aside for somebody else. In no case could a mother take her baby to her room. For me, the rule meant no chance to touch my son for at least a week.
I was sore about that. I thought it was outrageous, and so did Annie. We conspired to subvert it. A colleague who had given birth at the same hospital advised Annie to sneak our son out of the breastfeeding room when the nurse wasn’t watching. I could hold him. I was the father; I had the right to hold my son. We did it, too, and I took a photo. The nurse found out and was horrified. Germs! Infection! She threatened to bar Annie from breastfeeding if we did it again.
The big issue for me was the birth itself. I wanted a natural childbirth, and told the doctor months before. I also wanted to witness it and take pictures. My friends in the States had brought video cameras into the birthing room and filmed the whole delivery to show on their TVs. No way could I do that at this hospital. I think the doctor considered the idea disgusting.
He said a natural delivery was possible. But as the months rolled by, I began to worry. Not because of any medical complications, but from the stories I heard. Suddenly I took an interest in babies, and asked other people in Hong Kong—Chinese and foreigners—about theirs. They had been to different hospitals and doctors. Nearly all had given birth by C-section.
No Lamaze class was available at our Chinese hospital, so we signed up for one at an American hospital. There a group of Hong Kong people (many who had lived abroad), Japanese, Koreans and Americans went to learn the controlled-breathing techniques for natural childbirth.
We also listened to a talk by a Chinese obstetrician who had practiced in the States. He seemed very open. During the question period I asked him, “What’s our chance of a Caesarean section? What are the statistics in Hong Kong?” Suddenly he was defensive. “I know we hear a lot about C-sections in Hong Kong. But it’s not as if doctors just do them because they want an extra fee, or because they’re tired of waiting. They’re done when there’s a medical reason.” That was better than in the U.S., he said, where doctors operated to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits.
This doctor had heard people say the percentage of Caesareans in Hong Kong was one-third. He didn’t think it was that high, absolutely not, but he didn’t know what it was. Later I tried to find out how high it was. The territory keeps statistics on all sorts of things, from infant mortality (better than the U.S.) to workers’ wages. But not on C-sections.
Certainly the surgery is not always done for medical reasons. I knew of a vice-president of an American bank whose wife had scheduled a Caesarean so that their son could be born on August 28 at 8:28 a.m. In Cantonese “2-8” means “easy to prosper.” A child born at 8:28 on 8-28 has a head start on the road to riches. Providing such advantages was common practice, just like paying a premium for lucky car plates like “2888.”
Annie overheard a woman in our doctor’s waiting room expressing worry because her fetus was small. “So much the better,” a man with her said. “You’ll have a smaller scar.”
A C-section has become a kind of status symbol in Hong Kong. It shows that you have money, and can pay to avoid the pain. You can schedule your child’s birth into your appointment book. It is surgical, modern and convenient. Even the scar can be hidden by a two-piece bathing suit. And for the private physicians saving up for a move to Vancouver before 1997, it offers an operating fee of about $650.
Our obstetrician, recommended by Hong Kong relatives, had delivered a niece and nephew by C-section. Sure, he said, he would try for a natural childbirth if we wanted one. Were we attending the classes? Very good, yes. But of course, if an operation was medically necessary, it would have to be done. What were the chances? I said. Well, he couldn’t say. It depended on the size of the head and the baby’s position. It was too early to tell.
As the due date neared, he grew more positive. Natural delivery was now “quite likely” because there had been no complications. The Chinese hospital that he used had a rule against fathers witnessing the birth, but it was “probable” that he could arrange an exception for us.
All the baby books with the glowing accounts of natural childbirth said not to go to the hospital until labor was clearly underway. We were to ignore the two earlier signs, the show of blood and breaking of waters. Our doctor said the opposite. We were to come immediately at either of the earlier signs.
We did. Right away he broke the waters and used an injection to induce labor—hard, severe contractions. I had never heard of such a practice, but here it was routine. As for me, I was on the doctor’s turf, now. It was the middle of the night. I could not be in the labor room because there was a rule against it; I could not wait in the lobby because it was night. The maternity ward was closed at 9 p.m.—see the sign? So I had to go home.
Go home? My wife is having a baby and I’m to go home? Yes. The doctor would telephone me if I could come and see my son’s birth. That depended on whether the head came down, which it hadn’t yet. I could witness the birth only if it was natural. And only if the chief nurse allowed it—and the doctor said of the one on duty: “Even I am afraid of her.”
Annie was in pain four hours, most of it alone. At 1:30 a.m. the doctor called me. The head had not gone down; it was molding out of shape and putting the baby under stress. “I think now is the time to end it,” he said. He wanted my permission to administer a general anesthetic and operate.
I thought he should have waited for labor to start naturally instead of inducing it with drugs. The head probably would have come down, and not been pounded against a half-opened door. His method forced the pace, and if the body didn’t keep up, zip!—a C-section. But none of that was relevant any longer. Was I willing to second-guess the doctor now? No. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Morgan Drake Ramsey was born the Hong Kong way—a quick cut, and into the world. There are no videos of his birth, and no snapshots. Nor did either his mother or father witness it. These things, which were so important to us at the time, quickly slipped into the past. Certainly it didn’t matter to him.
Following instructions from the baby’s aunts, his Filipino nanny Janet made a pot of pickled ginger and pig’s knuckles that looked like stones in motor oil. It was pronounced excellent by all who tried it. She had to brew up a second batch—a good omen for our son, people said. The more people who took his ginger, the more likely he would be an obedient boy.
On his one-month birthday, we threw a red-eggs party in a private room at a restaurant. We decked our wriggling infant in a gaudy outfit and hung the family’s gold baubles around his neck. Aunts and uncles brought their kids, and the room filled with talk and the clatter of mahjong tiles. Then we tucked into the shark’s-fin soup, roast pigeon and suckling pig, and collected more than $200 in red packets for Morgan’s first bank account.
After the party, relatives came to see our son. Typical of the older generation was Little Aunt from Chai Wan. “Ooooh, isn’t he ugly?” she said. “Skinny, too.” But she said it in Chinese. All I could tell is that she had said something nice, and that Annie was beaming with pride.
Two Hong Kong Chinese women wrote me. One was sympathetic, but the other took offense at my line about “stones in motor oil.” Well, I expressed some annoyance of things Asian, and I wasn’t too sure Asiaweek would print it. But the editors didn’t see it, and I wasn’t going to point it out to them.