For starters, the Chinese population numbers at least 1.3 billion
people just in China, so it is conceivable that there is some
variation in practice across the group.

I find the most useful thing when working with someone who has ideas
foreign to the dominant culture wherever I am, is a good interpreter
so I can ask the specific mother about *her* beliefs, customs, and
find out what, if any, comments and questions she has for me. As a
corollary, I find the least useful thing is to meet her with an
assumption that whatever the last woman of the same nationality or
ethnicity did, is indicative of what this woman will do. Both of these
opinions are also based on what I find helpful when I, a foreigner
where I live, encounter health professionals or anyone else providing
a service to me. There are other parameters that determine at least as
strongly what kind of information she starts out with, such as
education, income level, whether she is from an urban or a rural
family, and her profession. I am not there to care for a culture, I'm
there to care for a mother and her child, and breastfeeding works the
same way no matter what language her mother or mother-in-law speaks.
Also, it's a rare woman who reacts negatively to being given
individual attention and respect for her as a person and as a mother.

I have stereotypical ideas based on the experiences I have in my
specific location, with women from various communities here. South
Asians in Kristiansand almost always bring small cotton mitts to the
hospital to put on the baby to prevent her/him from scratching her/his
cheeks. I see those mitts on other babies, too, but not with the
consistency shown by immigrants from Vietnam, Thailand, China, and the
Philippines, which are the main countries in that region with sizeable
immigrant populations in my town.

When the 'Back to Sleep' campaigns started over 20 years ago, we
learned that SIDS rates in New Zealand were shockingly high, and
surprisingly low to the point of being non-existent in Hong Kong. I
placed both my babies prone for sleep, on their NZ lambskins, and they
were among the majority who didn't die from that now infamous
practice. At the time, the Chinese tradition of placing babies supine
for the first 100 days (after which they went to the photographer to
have a portrait picture taken, with their nice wide faces and flat
heads!) was credited for the low SIDS rates in Hong Kong but I don't
know what kinds of epidemiological data were used. At the time, I
doubt there would have been reliable data about infant mortality from
China; if you doubt me, consider what we know about the practice of
gender-biased infanticide in China.

When I started midwifery school, the 20-odd students introduced
themselves to the group, and when I said I was from the US, the
teacher immediately asked me why 'all American women always want
dry-up pills' on the postnatal ward. Her experience was with US
military wives whose husbands were on duty with the NATO base in Oslo.
My experience was from Seattle and at the time, I had clocked about
ten times the breastfeeding hours of any of my fellow students,
including the mature mother of six in our class. I was the only one in
the class who was still breastfeeding through most of the school year,
despite there being half a dozen of us with children as young as the
one I was breastfeeding. I found the question baffling and a little
offensive, but I've never forgotten the occasion and I think I'm a
better practitioner for it.

Yes, you can know what is common practice in a country, but you can't
know whether the woman you are meeting is a living representative of
typical practice in her home country. You need to talk to her as an
individual and you need to take her mother and mother-in-law into the
reckoning just as you need to for any mother.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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