How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

by Shannon Young

  Dr. Thomas saw us the following week. He was friendly, warm, and welcoming. My shoulders, tense since the previous week’s class, finally relaxed. Maybe there was hope for our natural birth after all. Yet after listening to our concerns, Dr. Thomas immediately told us there was no need for us to switch doctors. He informed us, contrary to what the midwife had said, his practices were no different from those of the other doctors. He tried to assure us that we would be fine with the doctor we had selected and made no request for us to return. As public displays of emotion were taboo in Vietnam, I held back my tears until we arrived home.

  At my next doctor’s appointment, I presented our doctor with a birth plan, in both English and Vietnamese. I asked if I could explain it to her and she listened patiently while I described the birthing experience I hoped to have. When I was finished, she nodded and said, "Yes. I have seen these. Foreign women bring them in all the time. I will see what I can do, but ultimately, we have to do what we have to do at the time the baby is coming.” I respectfully restated my case, silently hoping our baby would be born on our doctor’s day off.

  Next to the actual delivery, many of my reoccurring fears revolved around the logistics of getting to the hospital when I went into labor. Our apartment in central Ho Chi Minh City was in a traditional urban Vietnamese neighborhood. Small winding alleys lined with narrow, multi-level homes opened onto a wider residential street. This central street, lined with small family-owned restaurants and businesses, led out to a busy thoroughfare. To get to the main road, we had to walk down our narrow alley, around a few corners, down other narrow alleys to the central street, then down the central street to the main road. Once there, we still had to select our mode of transportation.

  Roads in Vietnamese cities are typically filled with motorbikes, small 100 cc scooters that swarm the streets at all times of day, taking over sidewalks during rush hour to keep the flow moving. Taxis and other cars are relegated to one lane in order to allow the motorbikes safer passage in the other lanes. Unlike the motorbike riders who seem to disregard all rules of the road, taxi drivers rarely breach this one-lane rule, making taxi rides much longer than the same distance on a motorbike. While I thought it would be more comfortable riding to the hospital, in labor, in a taxi, there was a risk that we might not make it in time. I wasn’t sure which would be worse: laboring on a speeding motorbike or delivering in a taxi. Ultimately, I decided to put the decision off until I went into labor.

  One decision that could not be put off was when to fly home for the summer. As much as we loved Vietnam, we had decided that we should at least be closer to, if not quite in the same country as, friends and family back home once we had a baby, so my husband had accepted a teaching position in Central America for the following year. He had to report by the end of July, which gave us only a short window of time in which to visit family and friends at home in the summer. In order to be granted permission to leave the country with our baby, we had to secure multiple documents—a Vietnamese birth certificate, a Certificate of Birth Abroad, an exit visa, and a passport—in a process we had been told would take three to five weeks. We wanted to select a day to fly which would leave us enough time in Vietnam to secure all of the necessary paperwork and enough time to visit family and friends in multiple states back home before leaving again. As our daughter was due on Monday, May 10th, we figured that flying home on Tuesday, June 15th would give us the time we needed on either end, but with very little room for error.

  By Monday, May 17th, I was starting to get nervous. Now, in addition to my typical first-time-mother fears of childbirth and my worries about delivering in the back of a Vietnamese cab, I began to worry that we would miss our flight home. When I showed up for our appointment at the US Consulate, the consular-staff member looked around expectantly when I presented my paperwork, only to look confused when I pointed to my still-pregnant form. While I was relieved when the consular staff graciously assured me they could expedite our paperwork whenever the baby decided to come, I was still plagued with nagging fears of artificial induction and an operating room, so my husband and I stepped up our own induction efforts.

  Sitting in the small street-side dining room of our favorite Indian restaurant, we requested "Indian” spicy food for dinner, despite the heat outside. We sought out the bumpiest routes home on our motorbike. We even stepped up the pace on our evening walks around the track, trying to ignore curious stares as sweat pooled in our shoes. Despite our efforts, by my appointment with the doctor on Wednesday, May 19th, the baby had still not budged.

  Our doctor suggested we schedule an induction for that Friday, May 21st. She cautioned against waiting too long after the due date to deliver, saying it could pose risks to the baby’s health. Anxious and frightened, yet not wanting to harm my child, I agreed and left for home, still secretly hoping the baby would come on her own. Later, knowing how strongly I felt about laboring naturally, my husband suggested we put off the induction until Monday the 24th since the baby was not technically two weeks late until that day. With his support, I called the doctor’s office and rescheduled the induction for Monday. At 42 weeks pregnant, I turned our brisk mile walk into a full speed run around the track. By 7:00 Saturday morning, our weeks of waiting and worrying were over. We called our families to tell them the baby was coming.

  After a mad dash around the apartment to collect our things, we were ready to go. Not wanting to get trapped in rush hour traffic, we decided to risk the trip by motorbike. The twenty-minute trip led us down busy city streets packed with motorbikes, past beautiful French colonial hotels, over bridges, past river ports with enormous cargo ships, and into Ho Chi Minh City’s modern suburbs. We blended easily into the seamless flow of vehicles, no one giving even a second glance to the Western woman in labor on the back of a motorbike amid the heavy flow of traffic, except, maybe, when I pulled out our video camera to document the ride for the amusement of our child in years to come.

  We arrived at the hospital around 7:30 am and went straight to the maternity ward on the fifth floor. When we entered the ward, we found five nurses standing around the nurses’ station and no other patients in sight. The nurses looked at us quizzically without saying anything, so I began to explain that I thought I was in labor and that my contractions were two minutes apart. The nurses all looked at us and then at each other. Finally a nurse looked down at a file on the counter and said, "Ms. Sharon Brown?”

  When I said yes, she replied, "That patient is not here yet.”

  Confused, I explained, "I am Sharon Brown.”

  The nurse looked at the file again and said, "You’re not supposed to be here until Monday.”

  "Yes,” I explained, "but that is for a scheduled induction. I think I’m in labor now.”

  She looked at me again, consulted the file on the counter and said, "You were supposed to be here on Friday.”

  "Yes,” I agreed, my voice rising a bit in panic, "that was the original appointment, but we changed it to Monday. But I am here now and I think I am in labor.” The nurses’ brows furrowed. As I looked around nervously, a customer service plaque on the wall caught my eye, "Number 1: Excellent patient communication!”

  As I looked back at the nurses’ station, one nurse motioned for us to follow her. Grateful, we followed her out of the maternity ward, to the elevator and down to the second floor to Labor and Delivery. Once I realized my mistake, I understood the nurses’ confusion, as women do not usually go up to the maternity ward until after they deliver their babies.

  Once on the Labor and Delivery floor, we were led into a double room. I was hooked up to a machine that monitored my contractions, along with the baby’s heartbeat and movements. The machine immediately began recording a heartbeat and movement, but, to our surprise, no contractions. After another thirty minutes, with my husband diligently timing them on his stopwatch, my contractions returned, but not at the rate that had brought us in that morning. The nurse came in and told us that we could go ho
me. "No baby today. You have baby tomorrow,” she predicted.

  As I was walking out of the room, I felt a strong contraction that made me pause in the hallway. Another one came on down in the lobby. By the time the next one came on, as we walked out to the parking lot, I told my husband that it might not be a good idea to go home. I reminded him that my mother had short labors. He nodded, but suggested it might be better for me to labor at home where I was free to move around unhindered and get something to eat and drink. I agreed, not wanting to face induction merely because we had been in the hospital too long without progress. So we headed home, making a quick stop at the international grocery store for a box of pancake mix—after all, I was still pregnant and craving banana pancakes.

  Because my contractions were now much stronger, the ride home on our motorbike was less enjoyable. Once we arrived home, I was positive that the hospital, even if just the lobby, was where I should be. Thirty minutes later, after a hastily prepared batch of banana pancakes, we were back on the motorbike, recording, "Baby’s Ride to the Hospital, Take Two.”

  Once we arrived, the next two hours at the hospital passed in a painful blur of shameless screaming on my part, mostly about the fact that I couldn’t do whatever they were asking me to do: a) breathe, b) don’t push, c) push, d) don’t scream, in a room full of Vietnamese woman repeating, "Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,” and "You try, you try, you try.” From their panicked reaction to my outbursts, I assumed that their typical deliveries took place with happily sedated mothers birthing in peaceful silence. In the end, with my husband’s reassuring hand on my arm and a small Vietnamese nurse standing on my bed pushing down on my abdomen, I delivered a healthy baby girl.

  Although our daughter was born without medication, I did not consider my birth experience natural. Except for the absence of artificial induction and pain medication, I was subject to continuous fetal monitoring, made to remain lying in bed during active labor, given an episiotomy against my wishes and had my daughter removed by vacuum. She was taken immediately for examination and returned only briefly for a short five-minute bonding period, before being whisked off to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for monitoring due to the meconium in her lungs. The experience left me frustrated, disappointed, and exhausted, but it culminated in the birth of a healthy baby girl, and for that I was grateful. The Vietnamese emphasis on deference to authority and adherence to a rigid hospital rule structure did not allow me the birth experience I had hoped for, but their competence and professionalism delivered my daughter safely into, if not my arms, at least the arms of the doctor. While I mourned a little for the "magical” natural birth experience reported by others, I was ready to forget it all and move on to the business of caring for my daughter, but even that wouldn’t come easily in Vietnam.

  For the first weeks of a baby’s life, new mothers are expected to focus all of their energy on their own recovery. Infant care and all other tasks of daily life are taken over by close friends and family members, allowing the mother to rest. This expectation begins in the hospital, where mothers rest in their rooms, while a host of capable nurses take crying babies and return them, expertly swaddled, in a peaceful sleep.

  Because I was determined to nurse our daughter from the beginning, I was hesitant to let her spend any time in the nursery. I had been warned that Vietnam was a very formula-friendly environment where nurses would give bottles to babies even when expressly asked not to do so, not out of any form of disrespect, but simply because that was the way things were done. During the four nights I was in the hospital, I spent hours pacing the halls with a crying baby, acting out a familiar scene from many American movies and television shows. I felt it was my duty. I paced the back halls, taking care to avoid the nurses’ station where I was inevitably met with requests to take the baby or confused smiles. Ultimately, each night around 4 am, after a few near misses with doorways and some stumbling attempts to catch the baby before dropping her on the floor, I gave in and handed her over. Each morning, my red-faced, screaming child would be transformed into an angelic bundle presented to me in a neonatal cart by a smiling nurse. I knew infant formula was a part of the spell that was cast over my child, but in my early-morning sleep-deprived state, gratitude won out over any concern I had about future nursing struggles.

  As is the case for many expatriate couples, both my family and my husband’s family were twenty-four hours away on the other side of the world when our daughter was born. Once home, we would have no doting grandmothers to take the baby and allow us to sleep, no generous siblings to bring dinner. We did, however, have our friends, a second family that we had made over the years, who came to visit, bring treats, and hold the baby. For our families at home, we kept up a regular stream of newborn photographs and videos, and a promise to bring our daughter home to visit them during our upcoming summer break. Many of my daydreams included the moment I would place my daughter in my mother’s arms. But for that to happen, we needed to get home.

  In addition to the seclusion of their mothers, newborn babies in Vietnam typically remain inside for their first one to three months of life. Our daughter, unfortunately, did not have the luxury of time on her side. After just four days in the hospital, my daughter and I were out on the streets, taxiing to various governmental offices for paperwork to secure her Vietnamese birth certificate and exit visa, which we would need to apply for her certificate of birth abroad and passport to leave the country. Because of this breach of custom, we received a lot of attention from the grandmothers in our alley. Each time we left our apartment, they stopped us to look at my daughter and dispense some sort of advice. I couldn’t understand much of what they said, but there were two obvious themes among them: the baby was too young to be out, and she was underdressed!

  Given that Vietnamese women cover themselves from head to toe in ninety-degree heat, it should not have surprised me that this would be the case for babies as well. I had become comfortable wearing the characteristic face mask and the more formal coverage required by local custom, but as a new mother, I was hesitant to risk overheating my baby. Each time we were stopped, we would be given instructions via sign language. In addition to her regular clothes, we were told, the baby should be dressed in a hat, socks, and gloves: the hat to protect her head, the socks to keep her warm, and the gloves to keep her from scratching her face. For the first few days, I responded with an understanding nod and a gesture to my bag. Out of respect, I indicated that I had all of the necessary articles of clothing, even though my daughter wasn’t wearing them at the time. After two days of admonishments from little old Vietnamese women, I caved.

  For our morning outing on the third day of bureaucratic paper-gathering, I dressed my week-old daughter in a onesie, matching socks, a hat, and little pink gloves. As we walked down the alleyway, inquisitive glances turned into approving smiles. As I neared the end of the alley feeling quite pleased with myself, I was stopped by a young Vietnamese man who addressed me in unaccented English.

  "Hello. Is that your daughter?”

  "Yes.”

  "How old is she?”

  "One month,” I replied, feeling bad about my lie, but hoping to avoid a lecture on another grievous breach of local custom.

  "Why do you have her all bundled up? It is way too hot for all of those clothes!”

  "Are you serious!?” I exclaimed. "You are obviously not from around here! Where are you from?”

  "Canada,” he replied, smiling.

  Once in the cab, I removed all of my daughter’s extra clothing and learned to live with disapproval for the next three weeks.

  Finally, three weeks after the birth of our daughter, we had collected all of the necessary paperwork, packed our bags, and were headed back to the United States. Because we had to report to our next post in late July, we did not have any plans to return to Vietnam in the near future. We were sad to leave, but happy to be taking a big part of Vietnam with us: two years of memories and the unchangeable
fact that our daughter was born there.

  We hope one day Vietnam will not just be a place on her birth certificate, but a very real place she will come to know. A place where the present and the past live side by side, where the foreign mixes with the familiar. A country of narrow winding alleys and rainbow-colored houses, of country dirt roads and emerald green rice fields, of sleepy delta towns and bustling cities. Of hot "winters” and sweltering summers; of curious stares and friendly smiles. Of steaming hot pho and sweet iced coffee; of fresh grilled squid and savory shrimp pancakes. Of a deep love of country and a proud heritage; of a long, colorful history and a fast-moving present. A place where we made a life, friends, and memories in a culture that was once so foreign, and where one day, our daughter might return to make memories of her own.

  Sharon Brown is a freelance writer and editor. She published her first essay on life abroad in Forced to Fly II and is currently working on a book about expat life in Vietnam. Sharon has lived and traveled throughout Asia and Central America. She currently resides in the DC metro area in the US with her husband and two small children. More stories can be found on her blog at Tales and Inspirations.

  LOVE AND POLKA DOTS

  By Suzanne Kamata

  I’m wondering how I can get out of a promise I made to my twelve-year-old daughter, Lilia.

  A few weeks ago, I invited her to go with me to Osaka, two and a half hours away by bus, to take in an art exhibition. The latest creations of the internationally renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama—she of the polka dots, the pumpkins, the polka-dotted pumpkins—would be on display at the National Museum of Art in Osaka until the end of March. At first, I’d been planning to go alone, maybe while the twins were at school, or while they were stashed at their aunt’s house, but it occurred to me that Lilia was old enough to enjoy and appreciate Kusama’s art. Plus, if we went together, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting back in time to pick her up from school, or asking my husband or my sister-in-law to change their plans and look after her. My son would be okay left alone for a few hours, but my daughter is multiply disabled.