“I Rejected the Concept of Linearity”: Leslie Tai on How to Have an American Baby

Sprawling in scope, observational in form and jaw-dropping in access, Leslie Tai’s How to Have an American Baby shows exactly what its title describes. The title is also the name of a sales talk one of the doc’s characters gives to Chinese moms with the financial means to travel and gift their future offspring US citizenship. The Chinese-American director takes her viewers on the wildest of rides through a birth tourism industry hiding in plain, sunny SoCal sight: underground maternity hotels run by shady operators and filled to the brim with expectant mothers, local hospitals employing doctors in on the lucrative enterprise, cars of hired help serving as 24/7 deliverymen and caretakers, Beijing offices where travel agents facilitate all this illegal action from a continent away, tense community meetings with civic officials patiently taking public lashings from the hotels’ fed-up white neighbors. As one father ironically puts it, Chinese of every economic strata desire to have an American baby because in today’s security state, “We have no sense of security.” Prior to the Field of Vision and POV production’s November 14th screening at DOC NYC, Filmmaker reached out to the San Francisco-raised filmmaker, whose impressive bicultural bio includes five years working in Beijing’s underground documentary movement.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.