THE FARM: BOOK REVIEW
I picked up The Farm by Joanne Ramos after hearing about how similar it was to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Both books wrestle with concepts of surrogacy and socio-economic class, and both books follow young women who try to succeed within or attempt to challenge the status quo. I believe that may be where the similarities end (and this is not to say that The Handmaid’s Tale is a bad book, I enjoyed it), but the idea of surrogacy, one woman carrying another woman’s baby, still causes many to balk.
The young women who are paid to be surrogates, or Hosts, in The Farm reside in a facility called “Golden Oaks,” (the book title is in reference to the name the Hosts give the facility) where they are impregnated in labs and taken care of in order to ensure the best possible outcome for the fetus. Care includes a special diet, exercise classes, routine health exams, and even music therapy for the unborn fetuses. Care also, however, includes security cameras and Coordinators watching their every move, restrictive visitation policies, and other invasive protocols.
Women who seek the assistance of the Hosts, Golden Oaks, and its director, Mae Yu, are wealthy women who have either passed childbearing age or simply do not have the time to be pregnant with their busy schedules. On the surface it seems as if becoming a Host is a choice, with the monthly stipends and delivery bonus — a lucrative one at that. But once you spend some time with the young women at Golden Oaks, The Farm, you come to realize it may not be a choice made with full agency. In that way I will admit, The Farm is quite similar to The Handmaid’s Tale, but it must be noted that one takes place under capitalism, and another under a totalitarian regime. It really makes you stop and think. How free are we, really?
The dystopian, yet eerily plausible, novel follows a number of different women, but Jane, a young Filipino woman with a rigid moral compass and a daughter she is fiercely protective of, is the main protagonist. Jane doesn’t have much of a choice when the opportunity to go to Golden Oaks presents itself. Her old cousin Ate tells her about it, and that there are not many other ways for her to make nearly as much money as she could being a Host. It is this lack of options that makes Jane and others like her valuable as surrogates. I found it shocking to read what went into the choices that Mae Yu, the director of Golden Oaks, made when choosing Hosts. She purposely sought out minority women who did not have other options and would not question authority, citing Filipino women as “mild and service oriented,” the perfect dutiful, unquestioning, and moral hosts (easy for Mae to read and manipulate).
Despite Mae being the easy villain, Ramos doesn’t take the easy route. She manages to elicit reader empathy for Mae by setting up characters whose interactions with the director show that her decisions do not exist in a vacuum. She must appease investors, clients, and more. The true villain of the story isn’t any one character, it’s the systems of oppression many people face in America, and the ways in which this gets compounded by capitalist ideology. People will go to great lengths to achieve success, or even just to put food on the table. People are also just people, and the characters of The Farm show us just that. They all make mistakes, and many of them, throughout the course of the book.
The end of The Farm is unsatisfying, but I believe this has been done on purpose. The plot is chock full of intrigue, suspense, and more ups and downs than a rollercoaster, but at the end, it doesn’t feel like we’ve made it very far. The rich are still getting rich, and the poor are still doing whatever they can to survive — always thinking five steps ahead. In this dystopian, too-real novel, Ramos, therefore, has illustrated the circular nature of capitalism here in America and where it may lead: right back where we started.