A Chinese man hired a Florida surrogate, then didn’t pick up his kids because of visas issues, sparking a custody battle that could upend the lucrative, largely unregulated industry. Emi Nietfeld spent more than a year reporting this rollercoaster of a feature. One particularly harrowing turn involves the father hiring people to retrieve the babies for him:

As the men continued knocking on her door, Simpson’s phone convulsed with notifications. Zhou messaged her nonstop. He called 53 times. “If you don’t give my babies to us, we have to report to the police. And you will be arrested immediately,” he warned. Then came pleas—or were they threats? “Think about your daughter,” he wrote, referring to Simpson’s 5-year-old. “I don’t think you want to have her be live without you for several years!”

Halfway across the world, Zhou paced in his apartment, chest seizing in panic. Over and over, he’d tried to explain his predicament to Simpson. He was still waiting for his visa interview; without her help, he couldn’t get his kids home. Running out of money and options, he’d hired the handlers as a last resort. Now, as his calls and messages went ignored, he feared she’d fallen in love with his children and would never let them go.

Award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv recently published a collection of essays about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She talked to Lucy McKeon about her longstanding interest in stories about families and about revisiting old topics through new lenses:

LM

You write in the preface about your own experience of this. Not only in your relationship to your own mother, which I want to ask you about, but you describe revisiting some of these stories, years after first reporting and writing them, now as a more experienced writer, and a mother yourself. Through new insight, and in some cases encountering details you’d previously overlooked, you decided to make some revisions. I wonder how it felt to look back on this work by a younger version of yourself.

RA

I think I was most surprised by how one’s curiosity changes—by the moments where I realized I had failed to be curious. And where my present-day self would have identified a particular episode or trauma as foundational, I had breezed past it [back then]. It was about age, it was about being a different kind of writer, maybe. I kept noticing that I had omitted lost babies or dead babies—in three different stories. It fundamentally wasn’t registering to me as a significant life event. Those are some of the things that I felt newly attentive to, that I couldn’t just leave be. I felt I needed to address [them].