Baby Palm
Author's Note
Translator's Note

Everyone has a motive
Four delicately drawn female protagonists

Jane, the central character driving the novel, is a Filipino immigrant in her 20s and a single mother raising a newborn daughter.
Born in Manila, he immigrated to the United States with his mother as a child.
After dropping out of high school, she ran away and married Billy, and they had a daughter, Amalia, who was the apple of her eye.
However, shocked by her husband's infidelity and his family's attempts to hide it, she divorced him and moved to a Filipino immigrant women's dormitory in Queens with her newborn child.
There's nothing she wouldn't do for her daughter Amalia, and that's what led the kind and timid Jane to Golden Oaks Farm.
Jane's cousin, Evelyn Arroyo, known as "Ate" in Tagalog, is a sixty-seven-year-old veteran nanny and spiritual leader at the Queens dorm.
Her husband, a womanizer and a gambler, was useless, and she came to America alone in her forties to earn enough money to provide the best medical care for her son, who had suffered a brain injury in an accident.
Her ability to establish nighttime sleep habits in babies within the first 10 weeks of life made her a sought-after nanny for New York's wealthiest.
I also made quite a bit of money.
But Ate still needs money, more money.
It was Ateta who entrusted Jane with the newborn babysitting job when she was temporarily out of work due to health issues, and it was Ateta who recommended that Jane go to Golden Oaks when she was unexpectedly laid off from her job as a babysitter.


Reagan, Jane's roommate and Golden Oaks' "premium host," is a white man born into a wealthy family and graduated with honors from the prestigious Duke University.
She seems to lack nothing, but she has her own circumstances.
She accepts the job of surrogate mother because of her idealistic desire to give meaning to her meaningless life by helping women who cannot conceive and give birth themselves, and because of her realistic desire to go to graduate school and study photography without the help of her materialistic and domineering father.
Golden Oaks' general manager, May, is in her mid-to-late 30s and is of mixed race, born to a Chinese immigrant father and an American mother.
He has been on a roll, having been promoted to head of the Holloway Club, the group's core business unit, before he was even thirty.
He is ambitious to expand Golden Oaks' surrogacy business by attracting investment from Chinese billionaire Ms. Deng through the 'McDonald Project'.
He dreams of the day when he can prove himself to his mother and boss, Leon, who used to whip him while ignoring his insignificant father.
At Golden Oaks Farm, there are no perfect good guys or bad guys, no eternal friends or enemies.
Everyone just moves according to their own desires and beliefs.
Ate advises Jane.
Be polite to other hosts, but keep your distance.
They are colleagues, and pregnancy is work.


The sharp questions that "Baby Farm" poses to us in the "here and now."
Can women's bodies and children be traded?

Born in Manila, Philippines, and immigrating to the United States with her family when she was six, author Joan Ramos says the idea for this novel came to her one day after reading an article about the surrogacy industry in India.
Before the Indian parliament passed a bill banning "commercial" surrogacy in early 2019, the surrogacy industry in India, notorious as the "baby factory of the world," was worth $400 million (approximately 440 billion won) annually.
In a village in Gujarat, where the majority of the population is poor, it was reported in the Korean media that 30 percent of the female residents, or about 200 people, were working as surrogate mothers.
After Thailand, Nepal, and India recently banned commercial surrogacy, former Eastern Bloc countries such as Russia and Ukraine are emerging as alternatives.
In Ukraine in particular, it is estimated that there are over a dozen surrogacy agencies operating, each managing around 500 surrogate mothers.
Earlier this year, Russia was rocked by the discovery of a "baby factory" housing surrogate mothers in an apartment complex, and in July, news broke of over 1,000 babies unable to be returned to their parents in China, Singapore, Australia, and France due to border closures caused by the pandemic.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), surrogacy nearly tripled between 2007 and 2016.


This is why many Anglo-American press reviews have said that Baby Farm is “not something that will happen 100 years from now, but something that will happen next week” (USA Today).
Of course, this novel does not dogmatically serve the 'anti-surrogacy movement' or deliver a simple moral that life is not a tradeable commodity.
The Golden Oaks farm in the novel is a far cry from the harsh and dangerous facilities of underdeveloped countries.
However, the novel's strategy and greatest strength is to constantly ask the reader questions and make them ponder what ethical dilemmas might arise even in the best surrogacy facility imaginable, through the various incidents that unfold within it and the conversations between characters with diverse perspectives on Golden Oaks.


For example, Reagan, who is white, subtly hints to May during his interview to decide whether to accept her at Golden Oaks that he is concerned that most of the hosts there are "people of color," saying this:
“You may not have any other choice.
What I mean is, for one party [the host], the 'exchange' may not be a 'good deal', but just the best of a bunch of crappy options.” (p. 94) This passage points out that in commercial surrogacy transactions, the biological mother is always in a much lower socioeconomic class than the client, and it takes on the aspect of class exploitation by capital.
An incident in which one of the hosts is forced to have an abortion after her fetus is found to have trisomy 21, a factor in Down syndrome (although the scene is not depicted), leaves a huge shock to the Filipino Catholic hosts.
In fact, similar incidents have been recurring, including the real-life incident in 2014 where an Australian couple abandoned their baby with Down syndrome to a surrogate mother in Thailand.


After the shattered American dream
The Current State of Poor American Immigrant Women in the Trump Era

Another major theme that shapes this novel is the racial/immigrant issues that have exploded in America since the Trump era.
Above all, this work is significant in that it vividly portrays the lives of immigrant women from underdeveloped Asian countries, who have been pushed to the margins of American society and have thus far gone unnoticed, and gives them a voice.
This work also fits in with the recent major literary trend of the typewriters taking center stage and the parties involved making their voices heard.
Although their social backgrounds are different, Joan Ramos, herself a Filipino immigrant, says in her 'Author's Note':


Perhaps because I am Filipino and am naturally talkative and curious about people, I became close with many of the Filipino care workers in my area.
Of course, the same was true for people from South America, the Caribbean, and other Asian countries.
I listened to their stories of their slacker husbands, their demanding employers, their Queens dormitories where they could rent beds by the day, and how they saved money to send home halfway around the world to their children, parents, nieces and nephews.
I saw these women making sacrifices every day, hoping for something better—if not for themselves, then for their children—and the enormous obstacles that stood in their way.

The author's observations are vividly expressed in the descriptions of the Queens dormitory for Filipino immigrant women and its people, the practical know-how that Ate imparts to Jane, who takes her place as a nanny for a wealthy family (pp. 44-49), and the realistic and thrilling episode early in the novel where Ate and Jane look after the babies of wealthy families.
The portrayal of so-called "woke" white liberals pretending to respect their nannies and housekeepers but actually sympathizing with them and drawing a line between them and other human beings, and the psychological portrayal of Ate and Jane's clear awareness of this, is poignant.
Ate muses to herself as Mrs. Carter suggests that it might be better for her to stay in America with her disabled child.
“How could she know? In America, if you’re not rich, you have to be strong or young.” (p. 230)