Although this idea is under fierce attack from some in China’s younger generation, it still resonates with many young Chinese people, including some gay men who are asked, or volunteer, to have a child to protect the mianzi of their parents and themselves.įor some of the parents, that means going as far as pushing their sons into the surrogacy journey. The social and cultural norm in China, inherited from thousands of years of patriarchal traditions, is that having a descendant of your own blood is necessary for a good life. Li says that for many gay men, the strong push for babies comes from the elder generation. But they also often mentioned mianzi, the nuanced Chinese concept that literally translates to “face” but also means social standing and dignity. Almost all of them started considering it between the ages of 30 and 40, and they often discussed how one needs to be extremely devoted to the idea of having his own child before embarking on the lengthy and often excruciating surrogacy journey. Photograph: Courtesy Quiguang Li and Wei Xuįor this story, I spoke to a dozen gay Chinese men who have begun or completed surrogacy in the United States. Qiguang Li and Wei Xu arrive at Los Angeles International Airport on their first trip to the US, in 2015. Because gay couples are not allowed to marry or adopt in China, they started thinking about surrogacy. By 2014 they owned two properties together and had just started a small business, a dry cleaners in Shanghai. They’d chatted online and had a few phone calls, but when they met in person, it was love at first sight. They had both grown up in rural China before moving to big cities. Xu and Li met in Shanghai on 15 November 2007. Like Li and Xu, many of them refer to their surrogacy process as their “journey”. They traveled nearly 50,000 miles, spent more than $200,000, and went through countless days of distress, all to fulfill the dream of having their own family.Īn increasing number of Chinese gay men, like Li and Xu, are traveling thousands of miles and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pursue a dream that is impossible at home. Li and Xu, a gay couple who have been together since 2007, would walk out of the airport, get married two days later in Los Angeles, and, more important, start their journey toward parenthood.įrom 2015 to 2018, Li and Xu made four transpacific trips as part of their gestational surrogacy processes. There were a few other things they didn’t mention to the CBP officers.
The unexpected incident was the prelude to a carefully planned trip into another country where their sexuality was much more accepted than at home.
“But we felt kind of ashamed to say that,” he recalls. Xu learned that if they had said they were partners from the beginning, they would have been allowed to go through border control together, avoiding all the drama. Xu kept explaining that they were very close friends, until at one point the officer asked: “Are you two partners?”Īnd then everything changed. An officer asked them why one’s documents were in the hands of the other. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.In the secondary screening room – commonly referred to by Chinese travelers as the “small dark room” – Xu and Li waited almost three hours, believing that they would be denied entry. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards.
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