My Family and Other Globalizers | Pregnant in Beijing, during the 2008 Olympics

As with most things in China, the more pressing concerns with pregnancy had to do with food. From the maid at home to the sales assistant at a furniture store, my swelling belly elicited almost instant gastronomic advice. (Image: Shvets Production via Pexels)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens

My first born, Ishaan, was a Beijing-baby. I was eight months pregnant with him during the 2008 Olympic Games that were held in the Chinese capital. It was while watching a match between tennis superstars Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer that my spouse and I came up with Ishaan’s Spanish middle name, something we’d been casting about for without agreement: Rafael.

Read more here

By this time, I had already been living in China for six years. Yet, it hadn’t been enough to prepare me for the experience of being a pregnant expat in China; caught squarely between oriental lore and western fetishes.

As with most things in China, the more pressing concerns with pregnancy had to do with food. From the maid at home to the sales assistant at a furniture store, my swelling belly had elicited almost instant gastronomic advice. “Bird’s Nest soup,” a friend guaranteed was the way to a bonny baby. Not being partial to avian saliva, even that belonging to Indonesian swifts (from whom the nests are traditionally harvested), I’d demurred, only to be assured that snow frog’s ovaries had been known to do the trick too.

I’d begun to eat out at western restaurants more often, in the hope of avoiding having the private parts of exotic beasts thrust upon my pregnant self. But new dangers lurked. At a small French bistro, I settled down happily to order a platter of oven-roasted Mediterranean vegetables only to be told off with great authority by a 20-year-old Chinese waiter that I should be eating meat rather than vegetables in “my condition.”

My Harvard Medical School-educated, American-of-Persian-descent, gynaecologist was dismissive of much of this Chinese gastro-natal discourse. “Just eat healthily,” she said reassuringly. And then, almost as an afterthought, “and remember to take your folic acid daily. Also, your iron supplements, and of course, your calcium boosters.”

An obedient follower of the pharmacopoeia school of pregnancy, I popped my pills as required, but true to my multiple identities simultaneously attempted to follow at least some of the Chinese advice that was liberally dispensed my way. I eschewed foot massages and ate the occasional Wu Ji (small, black chicken) soup that was highly recommended for its nutritious properties.

But it was only in my seventh month of pregnancy when my husband and I signed up for an innocuously labelled series of “child-birth preparation” classes, that I encountered a third pregnancy-related narrative strand: granola-natural.

The curly haired American mid-wife, who was our instructor into the mysteries of labour and beyond, belonged to the “take back the birth” school - a grassroots movement in the US deeply suspicious of medical interventions in the birthing process. This was a school that at its basics could be summed up as: epidural-bad; au natural home birth good; C-section-very bad; moist-eyed husband cutting umbilical cord post-birth himself-very good.

Classes usually kicked off with a 15-minute birthing video in which we were subjected to gory closeups of labouring moms panting and infant heads crowning. The majority of our classmates were westerners, and all were first-time parents. As the birthing videos progressed in graphic mucous-drenched detail, the husbands in the room tended to gently massage their spouses’ bellies, or tenderly stroke their necks in comfort. The wives usually gripped their partners’ hands tightly, giving them the occasional wan smile.

All that is except for one husband – mine- and one wife – me. In our case it was me who had to massage my spouse’s back in reassuring comfort, while he went as limp as a jelly fish, with fear. “There, there, it’s not so bad,” I would murmur along with the other husbands.

I could now almost begin to understand the overwhelming preference for caesareans that urban Chinese women seemed to have. At the time, some 40 percent of women in Chinese cities had voluntarily opted for C-sections over natural births.

Our instructor switched off the C-section video and turned around to face the class with a strained smile. “Now, the most important thing to remember,” she said with false cheer lacing her voice, “is that even if you find yourself forced to have a caesarean, you must not think of yourself as a failure.”

Another arena where East and West seemed as far apart as Kipling had once predicted was on the issue of pregnancy and exercise. While our mid-wife suggested exercise: swimming, yoga, and powerwalking, as the solution to pregnancy’s innumerable aches and discomforts, the Chinese appeared to think the more inert a pregnant woman could manage to be, the better.

My husband came to see advantage to the typical Chinese attitude towards mothers-to-be. Throughout the August Olympic Games, he would make a great show of propping me up, as though I would fall without his support, whenever we approached the security queues at the match venues. This invariably galvanised dozens of eager volunteers who would herd us into a “special lane,” with a sign that stated: “The elder, the little, the sick, the disabled and the pregnant.”

A lot changed for me over the nine months of my pregnancy in Beijing. Perfect strangers appeared to think nothing of giving my belly an affectionate clasp. Where once our friends had given us chocolates and flowers for presents, they’d switched to nipple cream and diaper rash paste instead.

But despite these oddities, what my swollen tummy evoked in Chinese and foreign eyes alike was a warm respect; an appreciation, perhaps, of the magic involved in creating, carrying and delivering life. After all, that is the one thing that ties us all together irrespective of nationality and gives us our humanity.