On June 25, ChinaFile will screen Leslie Tai’s documentary film How to Have an American Baby, which explores the industry built to promote Chinese women traveling to the U.S. to give birth to children so that they can be American citizens. ChinaFile’s editor-in-chief, Susan Jakes, spoke to Tai about the film last year. The following is an edited excerpt of their conversation.

Susan Jakes: How did you come to make a film on the subject of Chinese birth tourism in California?

Leslie Tai: After living in China for several years and working with the documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, I came back to the U.S. in 2011 for grad school in documentary film at Stanford. Having spent six years in China during a kind of golden era, I then came back and found myself living in my mother’s house in Cupertino. It’s at the top of the list of U.S. townships or cities with the largest Chinese immigrant populations. And upon my return, I was struck by all these smells and accents and flavors from China that were suddenly here. The old-school Chinese immigrant community that I grew up with in San Francisco was mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan. I became fascinated by the people who made it over and what they were doing here. There was all of this real estate being snapped up by Chinese investors. At some point, there was a bus that went around Silicon Valley for Chinese buyers of homes. It was a boom.

I was very clear that I wanted to do something about Chinese tourists. We were seeing a lot of news coverage treating Chinese tourists like a plague of locusts, descending upon the U.S., spending their money. I felt I needed to do something about new Chinese wealth coming to America and treating America like a commodity, flipping the script in a way that would make your average American a little uncomfortable, when it’s just a fact of a globalized world. I was very interested in the power dynamic reversal of “New China,” “Rising China,” and the fact that now the U.S. and China are competing superpowers, maybe. So I wanted to make something that sort of satirically leaned into this idea of a voracious Chinese consumer coming and consuming what America has to offer and framing it in a way where it’s like, “What could be more American?” I didn’t want to shy away from something considered stereotypical or taboo.

And then one day, a woman I’d known in Beijing, a very intelligent young woman, also a filmmaker who harbored dreams of moving to Germany, showed up. She was dating someone who had means. She didn’t tell me why she was here; I just assumed she was here for her art. Then we finally had a video chat and she had this big round belly that she was oiling up in front of the screen. She was like, “Oh, I’m here to have an American baby.” I said, “What does that mean?” And she said, “You know, my baby’s gonna be born here and they’ll be American.” I was like, “Oh my God, that’s a great idea.”

Why did she think it was a great idea?

Well, again, she had this ambition to leave China. I felt she was very open-minded and hungry for a Western-style understanding of the world. I interpreted that as: she’s trying to immigrate. She’s trying to find a way to leave China. But it had never occurred to me that you could do it in this way. It’s a very long game. She was the one who told me that when the kid turns 21, they can turn around and sponsor their immediate family members to have Green Cards.

And through her you came to understand more about the structures supporting this project?

She stayed in what was called a minsu, kind of like an Airbnb, but with like 14 people living in one house. There were many bedrooms. As soon as I arrived, I was just shocked at how, on the outside, it looked like you were in this nondescript all-American suburban tract housing. And then behind closed doors, all these people were living together trying to have American babies. There was all this drama happening among people living in such close quarters. We took a walk around the hilltop where she was staying, and she would point out, “Oh, this house and that house; this one’s a maternity hotel, and that one’s a maternity hotel. And this one, they’re the same boss. Those two are rivals.” And my mind just exploded into a billion pieces. I immediately saw, in my mind’s eye, all of these women behind closed doors, sequestered in a suburban Los Angeles hilltop that no one’s ever heard of, incubating their babies—and also the destinies of entire families. In that moment, I thought, “Okay, we’re making a film, and it’s going to be kaleidoscopic, or web-like. I don’t want to follow one or two people, I want to show all these people involved.

I wasn’t sure that the pregnant women were the ones I should follow at first; they were obviously in a vulnerable state. And I couldn’t imagine, at the time, anyone who would want to share their experience with me. I was more interested, actually, in the whole system, the structure of this underground economy–and all of the “ordinary nobodies” inhabiting the nooks and crannies of this human supply chain. I wanted to know about them. I wanted to go in and film slices of life with people in some kind of decisive moment. Instead of just trying to follow a family or two and over-explain their motivations, I wanted to film moments of various people who were embedded in the invisible web of this industry. Especially the ones who were just trying to survive. I was more interested in this microcosm or cross section of Chinese society in America, who were all, in some way, battling with their own disappointment with what they thought the American Dream was.