(ROLLING STONE)
By Benjamin Carlson
Peter and Ellie Yang, by all outward appearances, are living the Beijing dream. They have a condo in an up-and-coming area, a white Honda that Peter keeps immaculate and a rambunctious one-year-old son, Xiongxiong. They wear brand-name jeans and own separate iPhone 6s. On holidays, they go to Sanya — “China’s Hawaii” — as well as Hong Kong and Japan. On weekends, they eat out and take hikes in the Fragrant Hills outside Beijing. It’s enough to make them the envy of many. But when Ellie found out she was pregnant in 2014, Peter said he wanted to have their second child in America. “It’s for him to get a good education,” Peter says. “But it’s also for us — to find business opportunities and to make friends. Chinese who do this tend to be well-connected.”
Peter began researching maternity hotels that operate within the underground birth tourism industry. He chatted with sales agents and scanned large photos on forums like LA Fat Dad, USA Baby DIY and America Baby Home. One option was staying in a single-family home, rented solely to birth tourists, but moving into a close-knit residential community as part of a rotating cast of pregnant Chinese felt risky. Renting an apartment in San Francisco, as some of their friends had done, was less expensive and lower profile, but Peter didn’t know anyone there. At last he and Ellie agreed on a “middle of the road” option — a 16-room hotel in suburban Los Angeles for $20,000.
At the end of October, Ellie and Peter — who asked to use pseudonyms — boarded a 10-hour flight from Beijing to have their second child. The decision had made Ellie uneasy from the start. It seemed potentially dangerous for the baby and expensive. A friend with permanent residence in the U.S. told them the process was also legally fraught. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had turned pregnant women away at West Coast airports. She finally consented, though  — it was worth the risk to give their child a better education outside of China.
By the time they got off the plane in Honolulu, which is thought to be an easier spot for birth tourists to enter, Ellie, seven months pregnant and showing, was in a state of intense anxiety. Online forums had advised wearing voluminous black dresses and holding a purse to block the belly, but at least one poster wrote this was exactly wrong: “Since there are so many pregnant women now, if they’re all wearing the same thing, they know right away you’re pregnant.” Ellie decided to wear a maroon jacket and a gray dress with a flowing cowl.
While birth tourism has become extremely popular in China, no one knows exactly how many Chinese visit the U.S. each year to have a baby. In 2012, according to Chinese state media, there were some 10,000 tourist births from China; more recent estimates have put the number as high as 60,000 a year.
