The combination of palm trees, beautifully designed quiet condominiums, garden pools, warm leafed streets, and expansive sandy beaches often paints the picture of a peaceful sleepy suburban area in Los Angeles County. Young muscular boys can be seen enjoying the beach along with middle aged American retired people and recently moved to the area are heavily pregnant women from China. Though they may seem out of place, they have already started becoming a common sight in this area. But in the vicinity of these simple apartment buildings, there lies a whole industrious and working team of one of the rapidly expanding Chinese businesses who assists women that come to the United States to give birth to their children in a country which allows one to attain citizenship merely by being born there. That’s right the children born here will have access to numerous social services available for citizens including schools and hospitals and would eventually be referred to as ‘anchor babies’ which would help their parents acquire permanent residency.
Despite the Coronavirus, the author registered the existence of such tourism in the early 2021. It goes without saying, tourism of Chinese women getting birth in the U.S. has existed for a long time. It has been recorded even prior to the recession of 2008. Expectedly, such tourism was always connected with the expansion of middle and upper-class Chinese societies, as such businesses where targeting them. The entrepreneurs tailored their services around those women, providing services such as travel, accommodations, and medical care, which in turn allowed them to develop a new business in Southern California. More Chinese women began to come to the US in order to give birth to their babies, meaning that the tourism sector increased with new businesses and hotels, built specifically to meet the demand of these mothers. It is important to mention, all those activities were completely legal.
Director Tai has opted for a ‘Fly on the wall’ approach to filming, where her film turning points are some events and the everyday life of the people under study without any influence or intervention on her part. Hence, the voiceover unfolds gradually and slowly. The focus here is first on the business staff: nannies, drivers, chaperons and a group of waiting women on the beach, gossiping about their travel and visa experiences. The time and space of the phenomenon develops slowly previously, we had motives in the analogues of women who wanted to stay and then go through the ugly process of birth in another indifferent, sometimes borderline hostile, land, some women got lucky, some did not, we even got to see the annoyed local’s faces when it dawned on them that everything in their vicinity was perfectly law-abiding and therefore, murky.
Lastly, “How To Have An American Baby” serves the audience with great emotion real scenes intertwining with Chinese contemporary elites and low classes and there evolution through the lens of women. It not only revolves around the norms of Chinese culture but also challenging their orthodox traditions. One of the astonishing scene portrayed how a woman become a mother and viewer around the world witnessed an emotionally charged scene. This movie is indeed worth watching and paints a real picture of Chinese society breezed with ever changing stereotypes when German director Faust Tai crossed paths with her in New York City. The tale is about overlapping cultures where the underlying theme that each women face due to being Australian, American, British or even Chinese.
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