While manning the night shift at a baby hatch, social worker Lai Sum (Fish Liew) reads a newspaper article which wonders if progressive gender politics is responsible for a rise in abortions and the abandonment of babies. It’s a sentiment that comes off as a bit rich, given that most of the reasons given on the form that accompanies a child is that it is a result of rape, often of a very young girl by her close relative or another authority figure such as a teacher or a boss. Yet nothing is really being done to change male behaviour in a fiercely patriarchal society which regards childbirth and motherhood as a woman’s duty.
Lai Sam visits a Taoist priest and pretends to have had an abortion as a means of exposing him. When women like her come and ask for his help, struggling to come to terms with their decision and haunted by nightmares, he drugs and sexually abuses them while recording it all on tape. It’s almost as if he thinks that women like these are fair game, even before accusing Lai Sam of corrupting her maternal destiny and insisting that she’s sure to become a young widow and lonely old woman. Not even everyone at the facility has sympathy with the women who use it, the woman in charge explaining that there is a strict 30-second time limit for changing your mind and that once a woman has placed a child in the hatch it is no longer hers. Despite the pleas of one of her employees, she refuses to look for a woman who ran off after screaming and pleading with them to open the door because she wanted the baby back. Even if she got it, the woman explains, she wouldn’t be able to raise it anyway.
The reason that Lai Sam herself gave up a child six years previously was that her boyfriend refused to take responsibility and then disappeared. She couldn’t afford to raise a child on her own and felt she had no other choice than to put him up for adoption. All these years later, she is still haunted by her decision and continues to look for her son. Siew Man (Natalie Hsu En-yi), a young woman she tries to help, is also haunted by having had an abortion which has left her with suicidal thoughts and nightmares of a baby crying. She too had a difficult home life after her birth father died and her mother remarried. The pair of them run into a birth ritual being conducted by the indigenous community, the leader explaining to them that in their society the birth of a girl is a happy occasion because women inherit property rights, contrasting with a lullaby which laments that a son will care for you when you’re old, but a daughter belongs to someone else once married.
In other ways, the use of the baby hatch signals the division in Malaysian society as those who place their children there are expected to fill in a form stating its race and religion so that it can ideally be raised by the same ethnicity. Lai Sam did not fill in the form, so her son was placed into a Malay family who are raising him Muslim though she is Chinese and are paranoid about the child being taken back. Another baby is given up not only because the father ran out on them, but because the child has ambiguous genitalia. Though the baby hatch only exists because this isn’t a practice that will ever be stopped and at least this way the children are kept safe, the centre faces a huge amount of hostility from religious communities who brand it “Satan’s Ally” and the “Cradle of Sin”, even while each of the women who has made a difficult decision to give up their child sobs bitterly and stares into the hatch until the very last second as they close the door. Lai Sam recalls a teacher who used to tell them to stand under the Bodhi tree if they’d done something wrong. She hasn’t, but she feels like standing under it anyway, which is, the film seems to say, what it is to be a woman living in Malaysia.
Pavane For An Infant screens in Chicago 5th April as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.
Trailer
Windows on Worlds 