When you're pregnant and caught between two different cultures.

“My family are ethnic Chinese, born in Cambodia, and I think a lot of the theory behind the customs must have got lost in translation.”

This is an excerpt from Alice Pung’s essay, Two Cultures and A Baby, in the Monthly‘s June issue.

“What are you doing?” my hospital roommate asks. I’m standing by the door of our shared bathroom, towel in hand, waiting for the nurse to return with a shower cap. In antenatal classes I was told a warm shower is comforting when going into labour, but I don’t want to give birth with wet hair dripping down my back.

“No, no, no,” my roommate insists, “you must wash your hair now!” I’d only met the woman a few moments ago, through the curtained partition separating our beds, when I walked over to the bathroom as my contractions began. “Didn’t your mum teach you? You can’t wash your hair for 30 days after you have a baby, so you must do it now. This is your last time!”

I smile and thank her for her advice, then slink back to my side of the room. She has a Thai accent, and I know exactly what she is talking about, but pretend not to. I also know that she will sequester herself in her heated house for at least 30 days after giving birth, refrain from washing her hair, maybe not even shower, and live on a diet of special soups and tonics.

Every pregnant woman, and new parent, receives their fair dose of unsolicited advice from well-intentioned family members and strangers. Most of it is mildly annoying, but some of it can be anxiety-inducing, particularly if you feel you have to pretend to follow that advice to alleviate the concerns of loved ones whose fears you don’t share yourself. The Chinese and South-East Asian practice of zuo yue zi, which literally means “sitting the month”, goes back thousands of years and is even mentioned in the I Ching.

Hospitals in Australia make allowance for this practice, which they refer to as “cultural confinement”, by sending nurses to visit the postpartum mother, who is not allowed outside the house. There are other things a new mother is not supposed to do: drink cold drinks, squat, eat certain vegetables and fruit, stand by an open window, turn on air-conditioning or cry.

Not every mother will follow all of these rules, and they vary in different regions of Asia. Other cultures also practise postpartum confinement – South Americans, Indians and traditional Greeks, for instance – but the distinct practices of my heritage spread from the north of China to the warmer climes of South-East Asia.

These are some of the things that mothers following the zuo yue zi practice aren’t supposed to do. (Post continues after gallery.)

My family are ethnic Chinese, born in Cambodia, and I think a lot of the theory behind the customs must have got lost in translation. Much of it seems like superstitious claptrap, especially when I remember my grandmother prohibiting my pregnant aunt from watching cartoons with us because she didn’t want the unborn baby to come out “deformed” like Alvin the Chipmunk. Whenever nurses ask whether I will practise cultural confinement, I tell them definitely not.

Nonetheless, during my own pregnancy I developed a heightened awareness of the fragility of life. I was grateful when friends gave me bags of baby clothes from their own children, but I could not sort through them or look at them. Just in case. I couldn’t digest the idea of a baby shower. Just in case. Because I was so nauseous for the first three months, I was filled with feelings of catastrophic expectancy. Conceived in a refugee camp and naturally underweight all my life, I wasn’t confident that I could grow a healthy and robust baby. I kept my fears to myself, yet with every doctor and midwife visit, I also realised how seriously the medical profession took the possibility of pre- and post-natal depression. My sister, who is a doctor, told me that some suffering mothers at the hospital wouldn’t pick up their babies or feed them.

Have you listened to Mamamia’s OutLoud Postcast? In this one, Editor-in-Chief , Jamilia Rizvi, has one huge confession: I hate my pregnant body.

Ever since I was 20, one motherhood image has inadvertently and continually flashed through my mind: a photograph of a mother holding her baby in a strange way. The photo was from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Meticulous in their documentation of death, the Khmer Rouge took photos of every prisoner before they executed them. The mother holds her prostrate newborn low, almost near her waist. She stares straight at the camera, the ultimate face of detachment.

At the hospital, I collected the beyondblue booklet A Guide to Emotional Health and Wellbeing During Pregnancy and Early Parenthood, but I also wondered whether there was one for new grandparents. All the terrible things that could happen, my parents expected to happen, with the only insurance being that I stay home all the time, only venturing to and from work. “Don’t go to Little Saigon Market in Footscray,” Mum warned me. “You’ll slip over fruit scraps on the ground, fall and miscarry.”

My parents cannot accept pain as part of my life. It seems to make them suffer more than it actually makes me suffer. They worry all the time, and in their old age it seems to have got worse. Their anxiety is physical and palpable: it scatters their thoughts and makes my mother break out with a nasty rash all over her limbs. From time to time, she also suffers from debilitating depression. My father still weighs around 45 kilograms. During the Khmer Rouge years, they lost everything – first their families, and then their possessions; understandably, their world has narrowed to a few concentric circles, the pivotal one in the centre being their children, the second their electrical appliance business. They have always been overprotective of us to a pathological degree. As author Helen Motro explains through her studies of Holocaust survivors:

Not all of our fathers beat their sons … Not all of our mothers froze us out as teenagers because they themselves survived by abandoning their own mothers at 15 in the camps. No, most of us had parents who loved too much, who smothered us with their care, their solicitude, their ever-present, all-enveloping anxiety.

Have you had an experience with being pregnant in a certain culture? We’d love to hear your story. 

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Alice Pung is a writer, lawyer and teacher. She is the author of Laurinda, Her Father’s Daughter and Unpolished Gem, and the editor of Growing up Asian in Australia. You can read more about her here.

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