Being Pregnant in China

To quickly avoid any rumors from being circulated, let me start by saying that I am not pregnant.  But the topic of being pregnant came up in my Mandarin class this week and so I have learned a lot about the cultural differences between women in the United States who are pregnant and Chinese pregnant women. 

Some new people from Boise arrived last week, Eliot and Tiffany Bailey.  Tiffany is pregnant and is due in July so I think the pregnancy topic came up because I asked my Mandarin teacher, Rachel, how to say the word pregnant in Mandarin.  She told me and that got us off on this tangent.  I asked her why Chinese women wear maternity clothing before they are showing.  She explained that women have a high status when they are pregnant, so they want people to know immediately.  There are these overalls with bears on them that women wear when they get pregnant that look more like something you would expect to see on a little boy than a woman.  I asked her why people wore those when I know that they make maternity versions of the clothes they wear when they were not pregnant.  She said that basically everything that happens in the nine months during pregnancy is for the baby.  The baby likes the teddy bear overalls so the mom wears them.  The baby wants that last stuffed bun at lunch, so mommy gets to eat it.  The baby isn’t comfortable if daddy is sleeping in the bed with mommy and snoring, so daddy sleeps in the bathroom (true story from a co-worker of my friend Claudia).  Basically, in a culture where the man calls the shots and gets what he wants, pregnancy gives the woman (and the baby) nine months to take over and get what she wants.  This is why they wear the maternity clothes when they do not really need them and why I often see pregnant women who probably weigh thirty pounds less than me walking like they have a fifty pound ball attached to the stomach, when they are only four months pregnant.  I also found out that some of the overalls actually have some kind of computer shield in them to shield the baby from whatever is emitted from the computer. 

Another difference is the man’s role in the pregnancy.  My friend Claudia told me that this week one of her co-workers was eating large amounts of meat and then flexing and stretching at his desk.  She finally asked him what he was doing  and her other co-worker yelled from his cube that the meat-eating guy was getting ready to make a baby.  After more probing she found out that apparently getting ready to make a baby requires the man to eat a lot of meat, exercise, stretch and give up alcohol, cigarettes and caffeine for three months!  How do you think that would fly in the US?

Now for the thing that I was most surprised by.  After a woman has a baby, she does nothing for one month.  No cooking, no cleaning, no leaving the house and NO SHOWERING.  Apparently the mom of the new mother takes care of the baby and everything while the new mother is healing for a month.  And as you can imagine, since the mother is not showering, nobody comes over to see the baby for the first month of its life.  Also in the time after the baby has been born, the mother eats a lot of chicken soup because it is considered to be nutritious and help the body heal.  And for the first few months after the baby comes, the mother does not touch cold water because people think that it will cause illness because the body is very weak after labor.

These are just other in a long list of differences between our two countries.   As I have said numerous times before, I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by the differences.  It is really apparent that the western and eastern worlds were isolated from one another for so many years and each went about defining their culture and all of the customs and products and ways of life differently.  Besides the pregnancy discussion, my favorite difference that I learned about this week was a notebook that in the US we call a 3-ring binder.  Since I had arrived at work in China, I had been looking for a 3-ring binder.  I figured there had to be one somewhere because plenty of people had notebooks with paper in them on their bookshelves.  After keeping an eye out for one for weeks, I finally gave up and when everyone was gone last week for the holiday, I grabbed someone’s notebook and looked inside to see how the papers were attached to the notebook.  Would you believe it but they were attached with two rings.  Armed with that information, I searched the place for a 2-ring binder hole punch and found plenty of them.  They are a lot smaller and shaped differently than the 3-ring punch so I had not noticed them before.  This is just a simple example, but to me it is really representative of the vast array of differences between our two cultures.

My friend Claudia and I are off to get a manicure and massage at a great new spa I found.  The $12 one-hour massage is becoming a weekend tradition.

Have a good weekend!