A dozen bassinets lined the walls of the warm, low-lit nursery where two babies slept and a woman tended to a third at a changing table. Blankets in some of the empty bassinets suggested that other newborns would spend the night here as well.
Across the hall, an open door offered a view of a double room, with one woman sitting up in her bed and another lying under a blanket. The women, both new mothers, were there for the Chinese practice of postpartum confinement — called zuo yuezi, or, in Mandarin, sitting the month.
To Western ears, confinement sounds like something out of a Victorian novel, but in some traditional Asian cultures, women still spend the month after a baby’s birth in pampered seclusion. Typically, a woman’s relatives would care for her, but more recently, the practice has been outsourced to postpartum doulas and confinement centers, like the one Ms. Lu operates. In the United States, they cater to middle-class immigrant women separated from their families. Business is steady enough in New York City to support at least four postpartum centers, tucked away in the heavily Asian-immigrant neighborhoods of Flushing and Bayside, Queens.
The centers largely fly below the radar of English-language authorities — they advertise online or in Chinese-language publications. They make up such a niche market that city and state authorities did not know they even existed. Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesman for the state Health Department, said that as long as the centers were not offering medical services, they would not require a license. A spokeswoman for the city Health Department said that it had no information on the centers.
But they made a brief appearance in the news when, in March, officials in San Gabriel, Calif., shut down what they said was a home for women who had come to the United States to give birth so that the children would be American citizens — so-called anchor babies.
It’s unclear whether New York’s confinement centers cater to that market. Generally they practice a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding their clients’ origins. Both Ms. Lu’s center and the ones run by Annie Gao, another Flushing confinement entrepreneur, give a Beijing phone number on their Web sites. Ms. Gao, when pressed on what kind of clients her center drew — older or younger, local or tourist — said: “I’ve never noticed any tendency. When a woman comes to me, I only see a mother. It’s a mother and a baby, and that’s all that matters.” (She, like the other women interviewed, spoke in Mandarin Chinese.)
There are no hard numbers on how many women might be using the New York centers for so-called maternity tourism. And nationwide, “we really have no way of knowing,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that seeks tougher immigration laws. Government agencies and immigration advocacy groups said they did not track such numbers.
In New York, many of the local clients are new immigrants who may be unable to secure visas for their own mothers to come from China. Others feel a center would be able to oversee the process better. Through their own savings and money sent by relatives, the clients come up with the $1,500 to $3,000 cost for a month’s stay. One of the first major postpartum houses to open in New York belongs to Ms. Gao, a mother of three whose bubbly spirit is matched only by her ambition. Ms. Gao, who moved to New York 10 years ago, said she would occasionally offer a spare bedroom to a friend who had just delivered and oversee her confinement. Word of her services spread, and she began taking in women regularly in 2004.
Until last March, she had run the Flushing branch of her service, Angel Baby Care Center, out of her home. In April, Ms. Gao, 40, showed off a three-bedroom unit on an apartment-house floor for mothers and newborns.
“I think of it as relatives coming for an extended visit,” she said. Now, on a typical day, she drops her children off at school, buys groceries for her family and her centers, visits any mothers who are still in the hospital and then shuttles between her two centers, one in Flushing, the other in a house an hour’s drive away in Suffolk County that appears to accommodate about 10 beds.
As with many traditions, there is no formal set of rules for confinement, but the emphasis is on warmth. Women stay inside and avoid cold drafts, because their bones are believed to be weak in the aftermath of the birth, and too much cold air could lead to rheumatism or arthritis. Cold foods, believed to slow the shrinking of the uterus, are forbidden for the entire month, as are foods believed to cool the body’s energy flow, like cabbage and watermelon. The women eat foods tempered with additives like eucommia bark and wolfberry (also known as goji berry), believed to purge the uterus. Soup made of adzuki beans is often served as a dessert because the beans are believed to reduce swelling.
A proper confinement, Ms. Lu said, lasts 45 to 60 days, but centers in the United States generally keep it to 30. The most notorious rule of confinement — a ban on showering and washing hair for the month — is generally considered anachronistic given the availability of clean, hot water.
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