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| The Wall Street Journal. |
Ye Zhen changed out of her pajamas and into street clothes, tucked a baseball cap over her head and slipped out the door of her room.
With her accomplice husband by her side, she walked past the guard posted in the hallway, keeping her head down and taking care to avoid eye contact. Moments later she strolled out into the Shanghai sunshine, a free woman.
Ms. Ye had escaped, but not from a jail or prison. She had busted out of a yuezi center, a Chinese facility where new mothers spend a month taking things easy after giving birth.
The centers are all the rage among Chinese moms who can afford the $15,000 or so it costs for round-the-clock pampering by nannies, health-care professionals and nutrition specialists. The centers provide a modern spin on the traditional at-home yuezi, when new mothers stay in bed and let others take care of the cooking, cleaning and child care.
Confinement is part of the bargain, as centers help mothers avoid the perils and germs of the outside world. The new yuezi centers try to ease the ordeal with posh accommodations rivaling those of high-end hotels. Indeed, some yuezi centers are located on leased floors of luxury hotels.
New mothers know before check-in that they won’t be allowed to come and go as they please. Even so, some inmates struggle to stay put for a month.
“My daughter and I got meticulous care, but it was like a well-equipped prison,” said Ms. Ye, 33 years old. “I wanted to behave well so that they would release me earlier.”
Food is a common complaint. By long tradition, there are many things women can and can’t do during their month of rest, and what they eat is carefully regulated. Oily and salty foods are out, lest they cause breast-feeding mothers to give newborns indigestion.
Ren Xiaojing, a Beijing lawyer, checked herself into a palatial postpartum yuezi in a two-story mansion on the outskirts of the capital after giving birth to her second child. Ms. Ren, 36, says she lost her appetite after being served yet another in a series of bland lunches: steamed carrots, fried pig liver with black sesame oil, wheat buns and fish soup.
To Chinese taste buds accustomed to a riot of flavor, it was barely edible. Taking pity, Ms. Ren’s mother brought her salted preserved duck eggs, rich with flavor, to boost her appetite.
Lu Xiaolan said she got food cravings halfway into her yuezi in Shanghai. She begged her husband to sneak in Papa John’s pizza topped with sausage and bacon.
“I heated it up in a microwave after midnight,” said Ms. Lu, 27, who works for an internet finance company. “It smelled and tasted so good.”
Chen Lihui tried to stick to her yuezi meals, worrying that if she ate the wrong food, her baby twins might become allergic to her breast milk. But after days of bland meals, she could stand it no more.
She begged friends to sneak in boxes of qingtuan, or dumplings stuffed with fillings such as red bean paste and pork floss, a popular Shanghai street food. Ms. Chen, 31, indulged in qingtuan, but limited herself to that.
“Sometimes I had cravings, but for the sake of breast-feeding, I didn’t dare to eat whatever I wanted,” said Ms. Chen, who works as a marketing manager in Shanghai.
The practice of yuezi is centuries old. By custom, the woman stays at home and is tended to by her mother-in-law, since wives typically move in with their husbands’ families. These guardians of tradition enforce a long list of yuezi don’ts: no showers, no hair-washing, no watching TV, no crying, and no cold food.
Sex? Don’t even ask.
As an alternative, post-childbirth centers have been popping up all over China in the past several years, spurred in part by Beijing’s decision to end the one-child policy—making large numbers of professionals, entrepreneurs and other women of means eligible for one more go at child bearing.
Many of these women live in typically cramped Chinese apartments, where the prospect of a month confined in close quarters with two children, a husband and elders is too much to bear.
“The yuezi was even worse than the childbirth,” said Wang Song, 34, an executive at a Beijing energy company, who stayed at home after the birth of her first child. Ms. Wang recalls soaking in sweat as her parents forced her to stay tucked in bed under a mountain of blankets, lest she catch a chill.
“My mom is a retired doctor, but some of her knowledge is outdated,” said Ms. Wang. “My mother-in-law also has her ideas of what’s good for me. It’s really tiresome just to deal with the relationships.”
After the birth of her second child, Ms. Wang checked into a Beijing center, where she enjoyed a private room equipped with an air purifier and imported bassinet, attended to round-the-clock by nurses and nannies.
Best of all, from Ms. Wang’s point of view: Her relatives went back to their own homes at night.
Yuezi center staffers also tend to be a bit more lax on the rules than rock-ribbed mothers-in-law.
“We understand that some new moms would want to watch a movie or go shopping from time to time,” said Wei Hua, an administrator at a Beijing center. “But we need to know their reasons and then issue an exit permit.”
Ms. Ye, the Shanghai woman who escaped her yuezi, said she didn’t think the staff would grant her permission to leave. Her reason for going home: She missed her pet poodle, An’An.
Thus she found herself stealthily exiting the facility one afternoon, posing as a guest who had been visiting. With her newborn safely tucked away in the center’s nursery, Ms. Ye spent a joyful hour at home playing with An’An. She said she returned before dinner, and no one noticed her absence.
Emboldened, Ms. Ye managed to pull off two more yuezi breaks during her monthlong stay. Even that wasn’t enough.
An entrepreneur, Ms. Ye had recently launched a clothing design firm and said she couldn’t afford to let the business slide. She began convening staff meetings in her yuezi room with her designer and production chief, who brought in fabric samples to discuss style and production matters.
“Seeing my staff come and go, the nanny was dumbfounded,” Ms. Ye recalled. “She tried to convince me to rest more, but eventually gave up.”
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