"In the mid-1980s, after the Indochina Wars, a shortage of men meant that many single women in northern Vietnam found themselves without suitable marital prospects. Increasingly, they began to pursue single motherhood by "asking for a child" (xin con), seeking men who would agree to impregnate them. Xin con was a radical departure from traditional Vietnamese kinship values and practices, which were based in Confucian patriarchal and patrilineal ideology. A principal question generated by this phenomenon was whether xin con was solely a response to the postwar demographic imbalance or whether it presaged a more permanent shift in reproductive strategy. Drawing attention away from men's patrilineal reproductive interests, the practice foregrounds women's maternal desires and subjectivities. This longitudinal ethnography, the first in-depth study of xin con, follows post-war single mothers through the next generation, exploring their reproductive agency, the government's legitimation of xin con as a socially intelligible reproductive option, and the new social position of these women"--
