How to Have an American Baby

How to Have an American Baby

How to Have an American Baby

Directed, Filmed, Edited by Leslie Tai, 2023, digital color, sound, 117 minutes

Mandarin & English with English subtitles

Tracing the underground birth tourism industry from Beijing and Shanghai to Los Angeles, HOW TO HAVE AN AMERICAN BABY is a feature-length creative documentary that takes us behind the closed doors of the once-booming shadow economy catering to Chinese tourists who travel to the U.S. to give birth—in order to obtain U.S. citizenship for their babies. Told through a series of intimately observed, interwoven storylines, we meet expectant mothers, maternity hotel operators and operator wannabes, local doctors and civic officials, birth tourism agents in China, and the nannies, cooks, and chauffeurs that fuel this industry. Inside bedrooms, delivery rooms, and private family meetings, the story of a hidden global economy emerges – depicting the aspirations and anxieties, fortunes and tragedies that befall the ordinary people caught in the web of its influence. 

Director’s Statement: 

In September 2014, I spent several weeks with my co-producer Chocho in a Los Angeles maternity hotel. She had recently given birth to a baby boy and was renting out a room in a six-bedroom house in Rowland Heights, California. What appeared like a regular single family home from the outside, was in fact, operating as a Chinese maternity hotel. Inside were four families from China, their nannies, cooks, and babies—all living under one roof—brought together by the quest to have an American baby. It was a microcosm and an allegory for the U.S. and China. China’s unprecedented economic growth had sprouted an urban class that could afford to travel and give birth in a completely foreign land and navigate the U.S. healthcare system with nothing but cash and the mercy of their maternity hotel operators—in order to obtain the “benefits of U.S. citizenship.” By the time I entered the story, this underground economy had all but taken over the Chinese ethnic enclaves of Southern California. To me this represented the epitome of American capitalism played out to its most logical extent. After all, what in America is not for sale? The Chinese were simply buying. It was the mental gymnastics, the total power reversal, the who-held-the-purse-now–the irony of the Chinese beating the Americans at their own game– and the grave discomfort that going behind the curtains on such a story would arouse in your average American viewer, that was the greater commentary I wanted to make. 

Chocho was my key into this otherworld that was hidden in plain sight in the sleepy suburbs of Southern California. Strolling through her hilltop neighborhood at dusk, Chocho pointed out house after house—each as nondescript as the next—that were operating as “maternity hotels.” I was immediately transfixed by the image of hundreds of Chinese women on this one hilltop alone, busy incubating their own fates and the fates of their American babies—out of sight and behind closed doors. What kind of messy lives were happening behind the façade of the all-American suburban dream: palm trees, hilltop views, swimming pools? In that instant, I knew the film would demand an unconventional narrative approach:

This film is about lives unfolding simultaneously in a complex world. 

Told through vignettes, the experience of watching the film is like wandering the labyrinthine hallways of an Asian karaoke palace. We peer into the self-contained worlds or “slices of life” of perfect strangers, placed side by side—brought together by their own, Chinese twist on the American dream. Like ships passing in the night, they are caught in an invisible web of relations that only the audience perceives. 

In this film, I am interested in observing the private moments of people whose motivations and worldview are outwardly at odds with one another—placing them side by side, in conversation with one another. My goal is to expand and to complicate our notions of human intentions; to draw the audience into the subjective experiences of the protagonists in ways that are disturbing, emotional, and unexpected. Behind closed doors, a cross-section of society incubates their destinies and desires. And the story of a hidden global economy emerges through the sum of its parts.