While growing up, the two critical messages a Chinese girl receives regularly are: Earn money and don’t get pregnant. 

The first part is explicit. It encompasses life choices such as working hard at school, pursuing only white-collar occupations, and marrying a person successful at making money.

The second part gets communicated more implicitly because nobody thinks their daughters are having sex. Implicit but effective was that messaging, given that unplanned pregnancy was my biggest fear in high school. That’s funny, because it was a completely theoretical risk. Back then, I had not ever been on a date. But it was the biggest fear because it promised a nosedive in my life potential; a future of hardship and financial struggle. 

When my sister and I were little and there was a situation in which we wanted things, toys like our friends had, or trendy things to wear, my father often would say in a deep, but teasing voice, “What?!? Do you think you’re a princess or something?”

And mostly he said it as a joke, but it did what it was designed to do: develop consciousness about money and how much things cost and who was working hard to pay for it. It had its intended effect of cultivating in me a reluctance to ask for things from my parents. That is perfect Chinese parenting. Raising your kids in a way that they never ask for anything, but that you are able to give them everything that will help them to attain wealth and success.

In all ways, we had it pretty easy growing up, we were sheltered and given many opportunities, and underlying this privilege was an expectation that we would be productive and self-sufficient upon leaving college and eventually have adequate resources and filial piety to take care of our parents when that became necessary.

The path toward wealth was best taken slowly and methodically. Work hard, earn money, save money, spend minimally, invest in real estate, save more money. The Chinese have long adopted the concept of reduce, reuse, recycle, but more as an economic strategy rather than an effort towards environmental sustainability. I remember watching my grandmother cutting four-ply napkins in half because if you were brought up correctly, needing more than a two-ply napkin to eat tidily was excessive.

Once when we visited the mainland, my aunt took my family out to a steakhouse. We were encouraged to fill up on the all-you-could-eat salad bar and have most of our steaks wrapped to take home to be eaten for lunch the next day. On the way home, we sat in the car, holding doggie bags on our laps as if they were trophies.

From a young age, I was like the Pake Police in my family. (Pake is a pidgin term we used when growing up for being a stingy (typically Chinese) person.) Once in fifth grade, while waiting with my older sister at a bus stop, I chastised her for being too free-wheeling with her quarters when she said she was going to use a pay-phone to call our parents to ask if they could come pick us up, “Just be patient! Don’t waste the quarter! Mom and Dad would be so disappointed in you!” She rolled her eyes at me and picked up the handset to dial.

Given my upbringing and having made it through my twenties and mid-thirties fiscally responsible and childless, naturally, my first effort to make a donor baby would be a low-cost, homemade one.

Insurance companies barely pay for treatments of couples proven to be infertile. My insurance company required medical documentation that a couple had been trying to conceive for at least a year before it would pay for infertility treatments. And even with said documentation, they paid for only one round of IVF. After that, it was all paying out of pocket.

I guessed that my policy probably did not cover people who were not legally married or people trying with multiple different partners over the course of a year. I never confirmed it with my insurance company, but I was pretty sure the policy did not provide options for people who were not in a partnership and had no means of trying.

It’s kind of an interesting question: Is being able to have a child fundamental to health and well-being, the way (at the moment) contraception for not having a child is now part of a basic package of health services? Or maybe another stark comparison: is being able to have an erection more fundamental to well-being than being able to have a child? So, if you need drugs or a medical procedure in order to have a child, shouldn’t your insurance company be obligated to pay for it? And if insurance begins paying for infertility treatment for people in heterosexual couples, don’t they also have to pay for the same procedure for gay couples or people who aren’t in a partnership?

That is as far as my musing went. I did not have time to be Loo vs. the Hawai‘i Medical Service Association Insurance Company test of jurisprudence, my biological clock was ticking.

So, now that I had a willing donor, I just had to figure out how to get pregnant. In my youth, sex was the cheapest way to make the most costly mistake of my life. But now twenty years later, trying to figure out a way to have a baby on my own, the thrift of unprotected casual sex as a method of baby making seemed a beautiful thing. I was close friends with my donor, but I still saw the importance of maintaining some — what is the right term? — professional relationship, but that’s not quite the way to say it. I was looking for a way to be clear about exactly what I was doing with my donor.

My donor was not my partner, he was a supporter. So, while I wanted a cheap way to make a baby, I wanted the process to follow certain rules and procedures. To be very deliberate and measured. I wanted it to feel like baking a very elaborate cake, rather than throwing together an omelet from whatever’s in the fridge the morning after a drunken hook up. I wanted a homemade baby, but not a naturally conceived one.

Plotting the home-made baby period was one of those times in my life that has underscored the advantages of being born at the right time and the right place. Socially and technologically, making a baby this way was unusual but within the realm of acceptable and possible. Most importantly, thank goodness for the internet. Advances in fertility medicine notwithstanding, the internet had a most powerful impact on these proceedings. What an optimistic commentary on society that just as there are online resources for making a bomb in your home, so too are there resources for making babies.

In this spirit, my thanks go out to a contingent of lesbian women in the blogosphere. Most of the information through my internet “research” I found was based on the very practical and explicit experience of lesbian couples trying to conceive cheaply through the collusion of their male friends or family members. There was a lot of information out there. Technical, legal, financial, testimonial, emotional. There were timelines, results of product testing, troubleshooting, and words of encouragement. There were postings by all kinds of women: sarcastic women and saccharine women, one-with-Mother-Nature women, down-to-earth women, and just giving the facts, ma’am kinds of women.

At first, I wondered why there was not more information from gay men. Surely, they were trying to conceive children too. I thought maybe lesbians are less able to afford professional fertility treatments than gay men. Or that the kinds of gay men who wanted kids were more likely to be able to afford surrogacy and fertility clinics. Or maybe, and more likely, gay men in this situation preferred not to blog in great technical detail about such personal travails.

In the end, I recognize that home insemination more often than not connotes the absence of men on the scene. So, what could men write about, not being actual witnesses or active parties in these acts of insemination? I still think that even if they were there, baby making, no matter how it’s done, is a subject for the kind of blog women write, not men.

It’s All Gravy

The homemade baby method is most often referred to in shorthand as the turkey baster method.

That tickles me, because making a homemade baby the way I was planning to has definite parallels to preparing a holiday feast to be served up for the scrutiny of your extended family. (More on that later.) There will be overt and behind-your-back critique about how things are done. Some members of the family will give you unsolicited advice. Many prefer a traditional method; others are more open to Turducken or spatchcocking the bird and want to know in excruciating detail everything you went through. Did you brine it? Is there a glaze? What’s in the stuffing? How heavy? How long? How hot?

The fertility clinic route was like plucking a turkey trussed and stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken stuffed with Andouille sausage and chestnuts from the refrigerated case at a fancy butcher. Homemade baby was definitely more akin to grilling the turkey perched over an open can of beer in my garage.

After some amount of study of the logistics of home insemination, the biggest challenge appeared to be transport. My donor was in San Francisco. I was in Hawai‘i. Correction, I was in Hawai‘i maybe only 70% of the time. That was a non-trivial detail for scheduling the transport of live goods. I needed reliable transport from San Francisco to Hilo (or wherever in the US I was). This involved special coolers and cold packs that did not need dry ice, and that were accepted by FedEx. It involved special vials prefilled with media to stabilize the sperm during their journey.

And large-sized plastic syringes that would get the sperm from the vial into my uterus.

Okay, the syringe was not an issue related to transport, but I want to assure people that the turkey baster method is a misnomer and, thanks to medical equipment available through internet shopping, the lowly kitchen baster has been replaced by a more appropriate, hygienic technology.

(This off-topic remark also serves the purpose of assuring people who were invited to my house for dinner and who ate poultry between June and December 2011, should not have had nor ever have reason to feel squeamish.)

The blogs I read spelled out the details of the equipment I needed and offered links to how to buy things in kits. So, I bought the kits. They cost several hundred dollars, but I got a discount for buying three at a time. There were delivered to San Francisco and my donor kept them in his bachelor-style refrigerator next to the sparkling water, bottle of sriracha, and single-serve packets of butter and cream collected from packages of take-out.

Insemination kits on hand, I was ready to whip up Batch One of Homemade Baby.

I let myself schedule work trips for the beginning and end of my cycle, leaving a good 14-day period in between when it was most likely for me to be at my fertile peak. Then the weeks I was working from home, I did what other normal women trying to get pregnant do. I peed on a stick in the morning and guessed whether ovulation was happening. But when my luteinizing hormone levels spiked, I did not schedule some sex with my partner. Instead, I had to text my donor and he would schedule himself to get home and produce some stuff and get it in the cooler box and off to a FedEx for next day 3 PM delivery to Honolulu. And since I lived in Hilo, the next day I would fly myself to Honolulu in the late morning. Because it seemed more predictable for me to meet FedEx in Honolulu, than to rely on another leg of transporting time sensitive goods from Honolulu to Hilo.

For me, it was a low stress, one-hour flight. I would spend the early afternoon prowling around my parents’ home waiting for the delivery. Tracking the package’s progress from San Francisco to Honolulu; from dock to truck to door.

It felt anticlimactic to receive the package from the FedEx guy. He had no idea he was such a critical link in this process of impregnation. He had no idea he was participating in the miracle of creating life, his actions part of a symbolic, 2,500-mile-long medical syringe connecting donor to uterus. How would he feel about that?

Maybe it is something similar to delivering a box of live chicks which have traveled across the country. He’d probably done that before. After hearing the little peeps coming from the air holes, I’m sure he took extra care not to turn the box upside down, or jostle it too much. My package was clearly a laboratory specimen of some kind. What if he could hear the spermatozoa sloshing around in their vial? Would he treat them gingerly, wish them bon chance? Would he be disturbed that he was delivering it to a regular residence, not a sterile laboratory? Would he be judging me, my desire, my process? Or was he just “trying to do my job, lady,” so it didn’t matter if the package contained live animals, or heirloom tomato seeds or somebody’s cum, as long as he got it to where it was supposed to go on time. Maybe he really would not care.

His blank expression while I nervously signed for the package was perhaps the most professional interaction involved with this endeavor so far. 

Once I had the cooler, I took it to an upstairs bathroom. According to the printed instructions for optimizing fertilization which I had downloaded from my online source, in the bathroom I had already assembled a set of yoga blocks and, as recommended by these instructions, some porn, or at least the closest thing to porn that was available in my parents’ home, a copy of Nicholson Baker’s Vox. According to the New Yorker review, it is a “phone-sex novel so steamy that Monica Lewinsky gave it as a gift to Bill Clinton.” 

I had bought Vox at a used bookstore a couple of years ago, while visiting my parents, but had never read it. It was a novel that had come out the year I graduated from high school, and I remember some boy in my class had kind of gone off about it and all the sex. Phone sex. It meant something different today, than it did in 1992, but it seemed appropriate for the style of impregnation I was engaged in.

Clearly, this was not a high tech, well-outfitted insemination facility. Later I would learn that fancy clinics have dedicated rooms for sperm production, i.e. jack-off rooms, with porn for all tastes and sexual preferences, dim lighting, and facilities for music, possibly sound proofing for the comfort of everyone. Whatever is needed to get the goods. That was not this. The mantra of home-made baby was Do-the-best-you-can-with-what-you-got.

There were about to be some minor acrobatics going on in that bathroom. I set myself up lying on the floor perpendicular to the tub, my hips elevated with the yoga blocks into a quasi-supported bridge pose, my feet resting on the edge of the tub. I had assembled the syringe, opened the vial, and began breathing deeply. It was tricky, drawing the sample into the plastic syringe, maneuvering the 8-inch-long flexible tip from vial to human receptacle, then depressing the plunger without spilling or leaking everywhere. It is not easy to do when you are half upside-down, but trying to hold a vial upright. You cannot see that well, and you are working against gravity. And semen, in case you didn’t know, is not a normal liquid, it has weird surface tension. It is alive and generally non-cooperative. And in the vial, it was suspended in the media to help it survive transport. It had the texture of egg whites, unbeaten. Preferring to slide around in clumps rather than one smooth homogenous liquid.

Somehow, I inseminated myself. But it wasn’t all over. The page I had printed out from the internet recommended that one masturbate, so that you’re well lubricated, making a welcoming environment for the sperm. And then stay with your hips elevated for at least 20 minutes. Staying elevated I could do. But this was not my idea of a sexy activity. I was not really in the mood to masturbate. I was on the floor of a bathroom in my parents’ home. They had seen me receive the package and go upstairs. They kind of had a vague notion of what was going on. At the macro-level only, I hoped. For their own sake I hope they were not thinking it through too much. It was worrisome, but I decided I couldn’t really be responsible for everybody’s feelings.

Meanwhile, my neck had a crick in it. But I was trying to create a maximally welcoming environment for the frat party going on in my uterus, so I took out Vox and began to read, trying to get a bit inspired. It was a bad book. Not entertaining. It did not get me in the mood. I was feeling annoyed.

As described in Wikipedia, “For some readers, Baker’s obsession with detail detracted from a hoped-for pornographic effect.” Yeah, that about sums it up. But I dutifully stayed there, perched with my hips on those blocks, for at least 20 minutes, the blood pooling in my head, and hopefully the sperm swimming, swimming their hardest, or at least given my uteral topography, draining into position, ready to be in the right place at the right time. I only hoped that my eggs were with the program and the ovulation predictor was right and this whole endeavor wasn’t some incredible waste of time. I was raised to hate waste, remember: reduce, reuse, recycle. The best approach was to do something the minimal number of times possible, using the least amount of resources. I was honoring that tradition, if not any other Chinese tradition related to my filial duty to produce grandchildren. 

Two weeks later, I tested myself and figured out it did not take. 

Mommy’s in the bathroom

I tried again two months later. I happened to be in New Jersey visiting my sister. Her 9-year-old and 4-year- old were playing outside when the FedEx guy finally came. He was late. It was supposed to arrive the day before in the afternoon, but here it was 36 hours after they were put in the vial. I was frantic, my ovulation window was probably over, it was definitely not optimally peaked. The kids were yelling from the front yard, “Aunty, Aunty, you got a package.”

“Don’t touch it,” I called out cheerfully, but firmly. “I’m coming.” I did not want to scare them, but I did not want them handling that package. Bouncing it around, tapping the sides. I could see the sperm in their vial feeling as stressed as guppies coming home from the pet store in a plastic bag. I was worried that being subjected to my nephews’ handling would be the last straw the sperm could take. The survivors might give up, just as they reached the literal and figurative doorstep.

I also was not sure the children should be exposed to this kind of thing. The less they had to do with it, the better.

And the easier. My sister probably would not appreciate the follow-up questions that might come. They were innocent. Sperm in the mail seemed so sordid. Explaining to the kids what was happening when I had my baby bump was a whole other issue that I would have to figure out. But answering the question, “oooh, what’s in the box?” I was not sure what to say. I do not like lying to kids. But I had not prepared a thoughtful euphemism to describe what I was up to at that time. It was not technically some type of medicine, or just something I had ordered online. It was a gift, but the kind of gift I should open in a bathroom behind a locked door, and then quickly dispose of the rest of the contents of the box.

I grabbed the box and charged upstairs to the family bathroom. I needed to hustle to get the tired, weak, and dying sperm into my body. I did not have yoga blocks, I did not have porn, the conditions were already poor. I was not sure it was going to be worth the effort.

Can you think of anything more depressing than lying on the floor of a bathroom shared with four other people, injecting yourself with someone else’s body fluids when you suspect the stuff has already lost its potency? But the package was there and I had already called FedEx the day before, demanding a refund for the late delivery.

(I had put on quite a performance over the phone. Tearfully, I explained to the customer service representative how my “very important biological samples,” had not arrived when promised. Through the break in my voice, I was trying to convey that the loss was heavy. I was nonspecific about what kind of medical specimens I had been expecting, to avoid judgment and protect my privacy. I hoped that the tone of my voice implied that there were human organs in the package. The representative could probably tell my address was not a medical facility and she probably knew that you do not send organs FedEx next day delivery. True, my package did not actually contain human organs, but how could she be sure? Since that tactic had not incurred sympathy, I then made sure she knew that now everything, in vague but monumental terms, was ruined due to the late delivery. And did I mention that I was devastated. She was still not sympathetic. So, I tried again to communicate what I was feeling the best that I could without mentioning my plight to have a child or have for myself what most other women had. Really, my end game was that I wanted her to refund the money for breach of contract and be so moved that she comped the next three deliveries. I misplayed my hand, I shifted to the moral high ground. She countered, offering contrition rather than credit. I hung up the phone).

Not surprisingly, the result of Batch Two was nada, no embarazada. So I did it again. In Honolulu, same set up as the first time, just different pornography. And the process got old very quickly. This part was not described in the blogs I read. It was a biased sample. People who posted the directions for basting home turkeys are the ones that ended up with babies.

My donor’s refrigerator was emptied of kits. His enthusiasm for this process waned. He found it hard to explain the contents of his ice box to people visiting his home. I was not that excited to invest in more kits either. The cost in effort and time was adding up and it was not yielding results. It just felt like waste.

I decided it was time to scrap the home-made baby plan and go to the professionals. I felt a bit defeated—almost embarrassed. I felt like I brined my turkey overnight in exotic spices, basted the bird all morning, and then realized my oven was not working. So, if I was going to feed all these people who were expecting to eat, much as I was reluctant to head to Boston Market and shell out for their traditional turkey meal with all the sides, I knew I had to do it.

I told myself to get over it and embrace the idea of having to go to a clinic, because the purpose of all the effort was to have an enjoyable family meal, not to impress people that I cooked it in a particular way.

Picking a fertility clinic turned out to be a bit like online dating. (Why was almost every part of this process so far, a bit like online dating?) But this time I was looking for the fertility clinic equivalent of casual sex. I decided to work with a clinic in San Francisco, rather than Honolulu. There were many reasons for this. One of the reasons I decided against a clinic in Honolulu was because I needed to arrange for freezing donor sperm to be used over the course of multiple cycles. And I had read about the limited capability to store frozen reproduction products in the state. There was one story about a doctor who maintained one of the few facilities in his office, but had gotten diagnosed with a late-stage cancer and stopped practicing unexpectedly. That was a personal tragedy for sure, but it also left a lot of fertility patients in the lurch, with no access to the freezer or their goods and no way to contact the doctor. The situation had been resolved sometime later, when someone had been able to get in contact with the doctor and understand the circumstances of his hiatus. It was clear that San Francisco was probably a much more established infrastructure for making babies in clinics.

And then the other reason is because Hawai‘i is a small place, everybody knows everybody and everybody feels comfortable getting into each other’s business. When I had some paperwork for the fertility clinic notarized at my local bank, the bank teller noticed the topic of the contract and started telling me her own story of infertility and trying to have a baby with her second husband, who wasn’t her husband at the time. She had her stamp poised over the paper and she asked me how my own process was going, how long had it taken to get to this stage. Some places this would be inappropriate, but here it was not unexpected. I gave her some cheerful line in exchange for her stamp and signature. Because in Hawai‘i that’s what you do. Smile and say something nice, no piss off da lady holding yo peh-pahs.

I called a couple of places in San Francisco and on the basis of location in the city and efficiency of the receptionist, I went with my gut and signed myself up with one of them. The one I liked had a good website and was located next to a Trader Joe’s. Which I intended to hit after my appointments and stock up on cheap nuts, dried fruit, and snack foods to take back to Hawai‘i.

Copyright © 2024 Virginia Loo, from How to B (Saddle Road Press, 2024). Excerpt published by permission.

Image by Ashim D’Silva.