How to Have an American Baby is a kaleidoscopic voyage into the once-booming shadow economy catering to Chinese tourists who travel to the U.S. on “birthing vacations” in order to obtain American citizenship for their babies.

The film’s Director/Producer/Cinematographer/Editor Leslie Tai will be in conversation with ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief Susan Jakes following the screening.

Tracing the underground birth tourism industry from Beijing to Los Angeles, How to Have an American Baby weaves together vignettes and deeply private moments. Inside bedrooms, delivery rooms, and 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. 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 who fuel this industry.

2023 / 117 minutes / Mandarin and English with English subtitles

Leslie Tai is a Chinese-American filmmaker from San Francisco whose work chronicles the dreams, anxieties, and consumer desire of China’s rising middle class and the Chinese diaspora through a distinctly female lens. Her work has screened at Tribeca Film Festival, MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, IDFA, True/False, Visions du Réel, BAMPFA, REDCAT, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and Wexner Center for the Arts, and has been broadcast on PBS and online on The New York Times Op-Docs. From 2006 to 2011, Tai made and exhibited work in the underground Beijing documentary film movement, as a student of Chinese filmmaker Wu Wenguang and a participant artist of Caochangdi Workstation. Her short film The Private Life of Fenfen (2013), a multi-layered representation of a Chinese migrant worker’s video diaries, won Best Film awards at Kasseler Dokfest and Images Festival. In 2013, Tai received the Emerging Filmmaker Award from San Diego Asian Film Festival for Grave Goods (2013), about the sublime objects of her deceased grandmother, and Superior Life Classroom (2012), about the Taiwanese immigrant housewives of Silicon Valley who sell Amway products as a path toward self-actualization. Her latest short, My American Surrogate (2019), about Chinese elite hiring American surrogates to carry their babies for them, was commissioned by The New York Times Op-Docs series and the Pulitzer Center and was awarded Best Short Documentary at the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Tai received a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to China and a 2019 Creative Capital Award. Her work has been supported by American Documentary|POV, Creative Capital, Field of Vision, Fork Films, SFFILM, California Humanities, and Firelight Media, and fellowships including MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco, NYFF’s Artist Academy, and Berlinale Talents. She holds an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. How to Have an American Baby is Tai’s feature debut.

Susan Jakes is Editor-in-Chief of ChinaFile and a Senior Fellow at Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis. From 2000-2007, she reported on China for Time magazine, first as a reporter and editor based in Hong Kong and then as the magazine’s Beijing Correspondent. She covered a wide range of topics for Time’s international and domestic editions, including student nationalism, human rights, the environment, public health, education, architecture, kung fu, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and the making of Bhutan’s first feature film. Jakes was awarded the Society of Publishers in Asia’s Young Journalist of the Year Award for her coverage of Chinese youth culture. In 2003, she broke the story of the Chinese government’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in Beijing, for which she received a Henry Luce Public Service Award. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. Jakes speaks Mandarin and holds a B.A. and M.A. from Yale in history. Her doctoral studies at Yale, which she suspended to join ChinaFile, focused on China’s environmental history and the global history of ecology.