Suzanne Gottschang's book offers an ethnographic account of “a group of women who navigated a path from pregnancy to motherhood and made decisions about how to feed their infants” (p. 2) in urban China. Gottschang draws on years of fieldwork during the mid-1990s at the No. 35 Hospital in Beijing, which is one of more than 4,500 Baby-Friendly Hospitals certified by China's Ministry of Public Health and sponsored by the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund. The Baby-Friendly Hospitals Initiative aims to promote breastfeeding among new mothers and symbolizes Chinese aspirations to actively participate in the global public health project. Gottschang studied 30 women and their families in the hospital and then extended the research site to their homes. Such multi-sited immersions yield concrete information on how women make decisions about infant feeding. The women-centred stories deepen our understanding of broad topics such as reproduction and motherhood in contemporary China. Gottschang convincingly argues that reproduction is indeed not only biological but also social and political. Caring only reveals itself in the everyday encounters among different actors, including women and health professionals, as well as the women's mothers, husbands and other family members.

Two key concepts, maternal governance and navigation, are threaded through the book, and they nicely weave the multi-layered realities of childrearing together. Maternal governance, is used to “encapsulate the expansion of the forms of governance in women's life” (p. 31). It generally refers to all the constraints faced by the individual women. Correspondingly, navigation serves as another theoretical framework to analyse how the women exert their agency to “actively steer themselves through particular moments and in others simply go with the flow and follow the path that arises before them” (p. 20). Creative pragmatism is used as a term to refer to the fact that women's decisions and practices are not only their unique responses to specific situations but are also simultaneously limited by social constraints.

The women studied were caught in a tension between contradictory discourses, such as breast feeding vs. bottle feeding, responsible mothers vs. feminine bodies, capable woman vs. virtuous wife and good mother. In the meantime, all the multi-layered discourses of modernity, tradition, science, nature and culture enabled these women to make sense of their own situations and make pragmatic decisions about pregnancy, breastfeeding, sitting month and childcare. Readers should not expect to identify a simple model or models to interpret the decisions women made as studies in public health usually do. However, it is exactly the complexities that provide readers a sense of richness and accuracy.

Important social changes occurred during the mid-1990s in China, including the one-child policy, structural unemployment and a national agenda of connecting with the world. The international public health concerns intersect with the Chinese national interest of raising the quality of the population. These invisible but powerful forces emerge from the everyday encounters in the hospital where the education classes, prenatal check-ups, childbirth and afterbirth care were offered to the pregnant women and were conducted by health professionals. What made the health professionals providing such services particularly interesting is how they navigated their roles as educator, doctor, caregiver and woman. By the mid-1990s, market socialism had already been largely established in the local hospitals; therefore, the health professionals were caught between differing requirements: generating avenues by keeping connections with various market agencies and implementing the policy to ensure the hospital met the criteria of being baby friendly. In addition, the author supplements her major field findings from the 1990s with the ongoing events and changes up to recent years in the 21st century.

Ultimately, the book challenges the popular logic in the field of public health, which ends up neglecting structural problems and blaming individual mothers. Adopting a universal biological approach to infant feeding, the public health policies for “decreasing infant mortality around the world rest on inducing mothers to exclusively breastfeed for six months” (p. 41). Gottschang intends to situate breastfeeding into the specific historical, political and economic context of 1990s’ post-reform China. Thus, she reminds us that in implementing any health-related policy, one needs to be aware of the structural problems and not simply aim interventions at individuals. Rather, institutional support from hospitals, workplaces and the family are necessary.

Readers would have benefited even more if the author had also shed light on the distinctions between women's relationships with their mothers and their mothers-in-law. Nevertheless, this book makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of motherhood, reproduction and infant feeding in anthropology. In addition to China studies, the book also is suited for students in other related disciplines, like medical anthropology, public health and gender studies.