Giving birth to a dragon

The Taiwanese health care system is amazing and among the best in the world. We generally trust it. And yet cultures are different and there is always only so much you know you don’t know. Episiotomies are widely more common here than elsewhere, for example, and we wanted to go without them—unless necessary, of course. But where is the line? From the outside, Taiwanese also seem to be more pragmatic about birth. C-sections are very common, often performed at the due date or sometimes even a few days earlier. And if you can decide when to get your child, then why not pick the date revealed by divination, some couples think. Then there’s language of course. Many doctors do speak English given a stint at a US university, but many others do not. As much as we are able to lean on Anna’s Mandarin skills during usual times, we didn’t want to press that while she’s pressing out our baby.

The idea of giving birth to our first child at what seems from Europe to be the other end of the world was already quite intimidating. But there was one more challenge: 2024 was a dragon year. Years in Taiwan follow the Chinese zodiac. The year in which children are born are said to be authoritative for their character and path in life. Rabbits are gentle and polite, horses energetic, monkeys curious, etc. People are said to be better or worse matches depending on their zodiac sign. The dragon—“mysterious and adventurous”—is the only mythical creature and thus the king of the crowd. Many Taiwanese and Chinese strive to have their children born in dragon years.This is visible in birth statistics, and usually has the effect that clinics are more occupied. Ironically it also means that dragon children face much more competition during their early careers and are actually on average less successful. Another such effect was that in the past, lives of some dragon babies already started more adventurous than usual, as their mothers had to give birth in the hallway because all labor rooms were occupied. It’s one thing to give birth to your child far away from home, without family support, in a country where medical emergencies were not part of your language class. You then don’t want to do that in the hallway of a hospital.

With all this on our minds, we looked for someone who could help us to navigate the Taiwanese medical system. In Germany, midwives play a bridging role between seeing birth as a medical intervention and as the natural wonder it is. They visit you before and after birth, usually at home, to make sure baby and mother are doing well. In Taiwan, the (often male) doctors are usually the only people you see before birth. They have a tight schedule in which to assure you that they understand your baby’s condition up to the smallest significant detail. Questions about maternal well-being are not necessarily at the center of their job description though. Luckily then, there are doulas. Wikipedia describes doulas clinically as “non-medical professionals who provide guidance through significant events like child birth” (Wikipedia). They actually feel more like wise elders who walk with women and their partners through what’s for many the most significant experience of womanhood, though. Ours was Angela Chang. She’s the type of strong woman who, were she Italian, you could easily imagine under a huge oak tree in the Mediterranean light among dozens of grandchildren. Being a Canadian in Taiwan instead, she rolled up her sleeves when entering the labor room to make sure that we got as close to the birth we wanted as was possible that day.