The Farm

Joanne Ramos

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, July 6th 2019

Alfonso Cuarón’s extraordinary film Roma has been praised for exploring the experiences of women who give up or forgo their own families to care for the children of others. This invisible underclass still exists today, a reality that informs Joanne Ramos’s thought-provoking exploration of immigration, motherhood, and the spurious distinction between luck and merit that underpins the American dream.

The story opens shortly after Jane, a young Filipino American immigrant, leaves her cheating husband and moves into a crowded boarding house with her one-month-old daughter and her cousin Ate. Determined to make a better life for herself and her daughter, Jane applies for a job with Golden Oaks, a commercial surrogacy firm with a small but exclusive list of wealthy clients that promises substantial payment for services rendered. The company’s managing director, Mae Yu, a first-generation immigrant who has fought her way to within touching distance of the American Dream, hopes to expand Golden Oaks’ services to cover everything from embryo storage to wet nursing. These plans require significant financial backing, which she hopes will come from her newest client, and the young, pretty, and submissive Jane is an excellent prospective host.

Within weeks, Jane falls pregnant and moves to The Farm. On this country estate, she and her fellow Hosts live in carefully supervised luxury designed to provide the optimal developmental environment for their precious cargo. Although missing her daughter desperately, she is reassured by the knowledge that Ate, a professional baby nurse, is caring for Amalia in her absence. However, as time goes on, she becomes increasingly concerned that Ate is neglecting her duties, particularly when she learns her cousin was paid to recruit her, and she eventually flees The Farm in a desperate attempt to get her baby back.

This story, which forms the novel’s central arc, carries a strong emotional weight, but what really sets The Farm apart is the way Phillipines-born Ramos draws on her own experience in investment banking and economic journalism to explore the moral complexities of outsourcing parenthood and the seduction promises of the free market. Where, she asks, do we draw the line between mutualism and exploitation? What distinguishes a necessary compromise from betrayal?  Does it matter whether women use a surrogate for necessary or aesthetic reasons? None of these questions have easy answers, and all of her characters are driven by complex and conflicting desires. Even Mae, the purest exponent of the Smith/Rand school of ethics, is far from a traditional villain; although primarily motivated the ambition to attain the same status as her high-flying clientele, she also sees surrogacy as a way of freeing successful women from the career-disrupting effects of pregnancy and genuinely believes – or wants to believe – that her actions are in everybody’s best interests.

At one level, it is tempting to buy into her world-view. Whilst most Hosts are migrants with few other options open to them, Golden Oaks provides them with both money and the opportunity for further employment (although not, as Mae admits, to white-collar jobs). Others, such as Jane’s roommate Reagan, are educated, middle-class white women who choose to be Hosts for more complicated reasons. And if a little creative license is required to align her interests with those of her Client, surely all parties stand to benefit from the deception? Even Jane, stripped of her innocence by her experiences, ends the book better prepared to protect herself and her daughter in the future and genuinely grateful for Mae’s attempts to make amends.

Ramos’s approach could be criticised as lacking in subtlety – for example, Ate and Mae both explicitly reflect on people’s need to reframe self-interest as altruism to maintain a belief in their own goodness – but this strengthens rather than weakens the book’s central point. It is easy to see that the ideology behind Golden Oaks is morally problematic, much harder to articulate why this is so. I am still unpicking the implications of this well after laying the story down.