Special Mother's Day Edition: Mom Spends a Month in her Pajamas

Shu-Chuan and Jin Fen together at the sit month center, January 2007.

Once again dear readers, let me rewind to December of 2006 when our daughter was born. Jin Fen arrived happy and healthy on December 18th, 2006 at the Siaogang Municipal Kaohsiung Hospital. My mother in law was there with me on that sunny and warm Monday morning to greet the new arrival and to help out in any way she could. After greeting me at the operating room waiting area with a can of Mr. Brown coffee for me to drink, and a surgical mask for me to wear, we waited together for Jin Fen to be rolled out in an incubator.

After Shu-chuan had spent the following week recovering from giving birth by cesarean section, I packed all the bags and drove my girls to a "sit month center", two blocks from the Love River waterfront in downtown Kaohsiung, Where Shu-Chuan would spend the month of January in her pajamas, recovering and resting in the company of several other pajama-wearing new moms, learning the basics of caring for a new infant.

Sit month is a Chinese tradition of some antiquity. The main idea is that a new mother requires total rest, for a full lunar month, to get back to full health. According to Chinese medicine, a mother should neither wash her hair for a month after giving birth, nor should she go outside, because she might catch cold, and certain kinds of food are prohibited, while others are encouraged. In Chinese medicine, food often is medicine, and foods are described as having a 'hot' (yin) or 'cold' (yang) temperament. Especially during the first few weeks, sit month mothers eat a lot of fish: two fish per day is the prescription. Other ideas about sit month are that the month after birth is a window of opportunity to correct any defects of the yin or yang elements in the body, and to increase chi flow. Sit month is meant to be total rest with uninterrupted sleep at night, and the new mother is fed special foods which encourage healing and lactation.

Traditionally, the care of the new mother and baby is the responsibility of the father's mother. Though many households in Taiwan are still extended families headed by the eldest male, this arrangement is not always practical or convenient in a modern industrial democracy. As Taiwan society changed, A new marketing opportunity arose: the sit month center. It's a fully-fledged industry in Taiwan, and the custom of sit month is still firmly entrenched in the culture as well: Taiwanese mothers are horrified when they hear how quickly western mothers are sent out of the hospital, and about how little support most western mothers have during the first few weeks of the newborn's life.

Sit month centers are licensed by city governments, and like almost every other kind of company, they get a lot of their business through referrals, that is by guanxi.
Baby product manufacturers often partner with local conference hotels to offer seminars on products and services. Shu-Chuan attended several of these day-long seminars, and though they were a bit tedious at times, there were some products that came to her attention this way, and best of all, there were lots of freebies, such as clothes, bottles, baby shampoos, and samples of formulas to be had. The sit month centers have a presence at these conference-cum-infomercials too, though it might be little more than a table with a few business cards.

In the end, Shu-Chuan took the recommendation of a friend, and for NT $100,000 (USD $3200) booked a room at the Cisian road Sit Month Center. It's located on the ninth floor of a typical downtown high rise apartment building, and has a view of the Love River and Shou1 Shan1, aka 'Monkey Mountain'.

The center accommodates up to eight new mothers at a time, with meals, laundry, and full-time baby care provided. Once a day, the Laoban (boss or owner) wraps the mother's abdomen tightly in a long linen wrapping to support the internal organs, and to help bring the belly back to normal shape. This practice must be thousands of years old.

In plan, the sit month center looks like a pleasant bed and breakfast, the only obvious difference being the large glass-walled baby room next to the TV lounge.


The Laoban cooks all the meals, and they are served in a small dining area with a table setting for each mother. There's a special Chinese wine that is used for cooking many of these dishes, and the smell of the cooking wine is strong in the air when you enter the center. The food consists mostly of different soups and broths and some meat, vegetables and fish. Shu-Chuan found it all to be tasty and satisfying.

The baby room, which looks like a miniature of a hospital baby room, is staffed by two full time nannies, who look after the infants when the mothers eat or sleep.

On Mother's day this year, Shu-Chuan, Jin-Fen and I happened to be in downtown Kaohsiung for a family meal at a downtown hotel on Cisian street, so we walked a short distance and paid a visit to the sit month center after our meal. Jin fen was greeted warmly by her former nannies, who certainly remember her. Her smile says that the joy of recognition is mutual.

Even though Taiwan is bombarded with images of westerners in general, and American and European pop idols, Hollywood movie stars and TV celebrities in particular, there's a strange fascination with "foreign babies" here. In fact, Taiwanese people are race-conscious to a degree that would be unacceptable in the West, and Filipinas or other darker-skinned Asians, like Jin Fen's nanny in the picture above, are frequently looked down on or ill-treated by the Taiwanese.

A different standard is applied to white foreigners though, and Jin-Fen gets a huge amount of attention wherever she goes, much more than "Taiwanese babies" do. Technically she's not a foreigner at all, as she is both a Taiwanese citizen as well as an American citizen. Though I'm often perplexed and even annoyed by the way Taiwanese people single me out because of my race, she clearly loves the attention, and somehow that makes it ok. Everyone calls her a "wai4guo2 xiao3 hai2zi" (foreign baby) or "Mei3guo2 xiao3 wa3wa1" (little American baby doll).

Jin-Fen sits in the lap of a pajama-wearing sit month mother, while Shu-Chuan chats with the woman and her sister. Shu-Chuan is a first-time mom. During her stay, she had constant interaction with the staff and some other, more experienced mothers, which was very helpful. The center is a very social place, but if mom is feeling tired, she can retire to the quiet of her room at any time, with or without her new baby.

So what does the new dad do during sit month? He's welcome to stay the night, and to visit as long as he likes. However, eating, sleeping, and washing facilities are limited, and he has to provide his own meals. Being a full hour away by motorcycle, I would visit on afternoons and evenings after class, and then return to the house in Zhao Ming at night.

I feel that I missed out on a lot of things by not having my girls with me for the first month, in addition to missing their company. I missed out on most of the one-month practical baby care course that the sit month experience provided to Shu-Chuan, and for a short time, it seemed as if Jin-Fen felt closer to Mom and her nannies than she did to me. In the end, the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks, perceived or otherwise, and this impression quickly passed. For Shu-Chuan, having a baby in Taiwan the traditional way was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.