The novel takes place in NYC, and at a fictional upstate NY surrogate facility named Golden Oaks, also called the farm. It deals with the coldness and ruthlessness of business simply for profit and motherhood within the web of class and race. Even with access to almost anything material, women are still measured by their ability to become and be mothers.
The author alternates the chapters covering the perspectives of four characters, Jane, Ate, Mae and Reagan. Jane Reyes and her elderly cousin Evelyn Arroyo (Jane calls her Ate) live with Jane’s baby daughter, Amalia, in a dormitory style house in Queens. The dormitory is a three story walk-up where bunk beds are crammed into bedrooms and people rent all the resting spaces – the beds and sofas.
Jane, a new mother, is struggling to make a living for herself and her baby daughter. She works for minimum wage at a nursing home until Ate collapses at her job, is hospitalized, and Jane fills Ate’s position as a baby nurse. After losing her position at this temporary job, Ate suggests that Jane apply to be a surrogate mother at Golden Oaks, which could secure Jane’s future. Jane agrees and goes through the rigid screening application process for Golden Oaks and meets the director of the facility, who presents it as a luxury facility where all your needs are taken care of. Surrogates receive monthly payments and a large payment after delivery. Jane moves to Golden Oaks after moving her daughter and Ate to an apartment with the initial payment from Golden Oaks.
Mae Yu is the director of Golden Oaks, a “gestational retreat” servicing the ultra-rich. She is on the lookout for more Filipino surrogates who are popular with clients because they are mild mannered and service oriented. At Golden Oaks, the surrogates, called hosts, are monitored continuously – their movements, medical conditions, and state of mind. Staff, called Coordinators, watch them closely, making sure schedules are kept and rules are not broken. The hosts wear wrist bands so their location and vital signs can be monitored and there are cameras everywhere. All media and communication is monitored by the farm’s surveillance system appropriately and chillingly called the Panopticon. Hosts are also assigned a number – only the staff knows the number designations. When Golden Oaks staff speak of the hosts’ medical and gestational progress and their behavior, they use their numbers only.
Now, the reader sees this environment as very controlling and oppressive because the novel gives the viewpoints and narratives of the main characters, including the head of Golden Oaks, Mae, herself. You see how transactional and ambitious Mae is. Golden Oaks was her brain-child, making surrogacy a money-making venture, catering to the rich. Mae is also paid well for her efforts and she doesn’t want to jeopardize her life style. The hosts in the beginning don’t suspect anything sinister; they just see Golden Oaks as a great opportunity to better their lives. But as these hosts lengthen their stay at the farm, they wonder if giving up their freedom, privacy and dignity for money is really worth it.
Once settled at Golden Oaks, Jane meets her roommate, Reagan. She is much different from Jane – white American, who’s finished top of her college class and has become a surrogate as a means to escape her rich father, who wants to dictate her future. There is also a big mystery as to which host is carrying the richest couple’s fetus – the richer the client, means you have been exclusively selected and your payments will be multiple times more.
During her pregnancy at the farm, Mae continually uses the promise of letting Jane visit with her infant, Amalia, to keep her inline. However, these visits are cancelled as punishments for Jane, leaving you to wonder if these visits were ever going to happen. Mae is the ultimate professional, always thinking of ways to control and manipulate her hosts and keep clients happy. She is pleased with the success of her facility and wants to expand Golden Oaks to provide more services – wet nursing and nanny services, a sperm and egg bank, embryo storage – Crazy. Mae also wants to open a second facility to cater to the wealthy on the west coast. She calls this expansion idea Project MacDonald.
Back in Queens, Ate, taking care of Amalia full time, starts a catering business and also through her contacts, helps place women in jobs for a fee. Ate is always trying to make extra money to send home for her adult children and for the home she is building.
Jane learns from a new arrival to Golden Oaks, Segundia, that Ate also told her about the farm and she was staying at Jane’s apartment before arriving at the farm. Jane also learns that Ate often neglects her daughter. It upsets Jane that Ate lets a stranger stay in her home, leaving her alone sometimes with her daughter and she lets Ate know this. Ate then call Ms. Yu to tell her that Segundia is talking to Jane and upsetting her – Ate has been recruiting Filipino women for Mae and received payments for sending Jane and Segundia to Golden Oaks. Contractually, hosts aren’t supposed to disclose to anyone how they were recruited – Segundia’s pay was docked as punishment.
At Golden Oaks the client, the ultra-rich person paying the fees, and the fetus, the product they are paying for, is all that matters. Through process of elimination, the hosts figure out that Jane is the one carrying the richest client’s child. Little do they know that several hosts, including Reagan, are carrying the fetuses of this client. The viability of this client’s fertilized eggs was in question, so the more hosts impregnated the greater the chance of success for delivery.
This lack of consideration for hosts goes further when a fetus shows signs of disease or defect, the pregnancy is terminated. When a lump is discovered during an examination on Reagan, they keep her in the dark until during the biopsy the doctor is forced to acknowledge that there may be a health concern. Sensing something may be wrong and wanting to find answers for herself, Reagan searches on Golden Oaks computers for symptoms of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, only to discover that the term is blocked by the farm’s network.
Ate and Jane haven’t talked since Jane found out about Segundia – she believes Ate is avoiding her by not returning her calls. Jane still angry with Ate and Segundia, approaches Segundia with more questions – how does she know Ate? Jane finds out that Segundia was punished for talking to her; someone spoke to Ms. Yu about their conversation. Jane wonders who. Through a friend of Reagan’s, a host named Lisa, Jane finds out that Ate is a paid scout for Ms. Lu.
Jane continues to call her apartment trying to reach Ate, only someone else answers and is told her daughter is sick with an ear infection. With Reagan and Lisa’s help, Jane finds her way out of Golden Oaks to try and see her daughter. Jane believes Amalia is in hospital because of information she got from her last call to the Queens dormitory. When Jane arrives at the hospital, it’s Ate who’s in the hospital, not her daughter.
To track Jane down, Mae and her staff review all communication data from Jane and Reagan using the farm’s Panopticon system and find that Jane tried unsuccessfully to contact Ate more than 100 times in the past month. Mae realizes that Jane is frantic over her daughter and she and her team travel to Queens. Mae is in the apartment when Jane finally arrives and she tells Jane she sent Amalia out for a snack so they could talk (even then, knowing how desperate Jane is to see her child, Mae keeps Jane’s child from her). Mae wants to know who helped her, who drove her to Queens. She threatens Jane with a kidnapping charge and continues to put the client’s and unborn child’s needs above Jane’s and Amalia’s. She also informs Jane that she will not be receiving her large final payment, being in violation of her contract. Jane, under this verbal and mental assault, breaks down and tells Mae about her daughter and Ate and why she felt she had to leave the farm. Mae feeling sorry for Jane, hires her to be surrogate for her own child. Crazy.
In the end, well, Mae gets her Project MacDonald approved for Golden Oaks and the west coast and it seems her plan also included Jane. In the epilogue after giving birth to Mae’s baby, she continues to work for Mae’s family as wet nurse, and nanny. Crazy.
This book, The Farm, may be fictional but the themes are all too real. The real desperation of working class, immigrant women working for minimal wages to help themselves and their families versus the ultra-wealthy they serve. The author, Joanne Ramos, talks about her history of emigrating to the United States as a young child and her family doing well, going on to college, having a career in finance and journalism, and over the years, living in Manhattan, the only Filipinos she knew were the ones who worked for her friends. She became friendly with several of these women and also those from South America and the Caribbean and heard their stories, this great divide between their lives and the wealthy. You definitely get that perspective and narrative from this book when you read it. I hope you give this gem a read and I look forward to reading Joanne Ramos’ next novel.
Loved this book!!