Mara Hvistendahl

Writer

• Born: February 2, 1980
• Place of Birth: Northfield, Minnesota

Contribution: Mara Hvistendahl is an American writer who specializes in Asian science, culture, and gender studies. Her 2011 book Unnatural Selection was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Background

Mara Farrah Hvistendahl was born on February 2, 1980, in Northfield, Minnesota, to lawyers David Hvistendahl and Laura Danielson. She grew up in south Minneapolis and Hopkins, Minnesota. Her mother, the daughter of a Lutheran missionary, spent much of her childhood in Asia and eventually became fluent in Chinese. After divorcing Hvistendahl’s father when Hvistendahl was six, Danielson was left with their two children, Mara and Jake, and their mortgage. To help make ends meet, she took in as a roommate her Chinese tutor and recently divorced friend, Hongyu Lang, and Lang’s son, Barrs. The two women spent several years raising their children together.

Hvistendahl first began learning Chinese from Lang, who grew up in Mongolia. A remote-access learning program provided by Hopkins High School enabled her to continue studying the language as a teenager. Hvistendahl then enrolled at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she studied Mandarin Chinese and comparative literature.

While attending Swarthmore, Hvistendahl interned at the Washington, DC, office of the Institute for Victims of Torture. She was awarded a United Nations distinction for her work there. She also earned a fellowship to help female Mexican factory workers establish a union newspaper. During the summer of 2000, Hvistendahl studied abroad in Beijing. While participating in this program, she began to notice gender inequality in China, particularly when traveling through China’s Jiangsu Province. There, she took note of the noticeably large majority of boys in Chinese classrooms.

After graduating from Swarthmore in 2002, Hvistendahl next attended the Columbia School of Journalism in New York City on a Reuters international reporting scholarship. She earned a master of science degree in magazine journalism in 2004.

Career

Shortly after completing her master’s degree, Hvistendahl moved to Shanghai, China. From 2005 to 2007, she worked as a contributing editor for Seed magazine. Named the magazine’s Shanghai correspondent in 2006, she wrote a bimonthly column about Chinese science. She was also a visiting professor of journalism at Fudan University during this time.

Hvistendahl next became the China correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education, for which work she earned a National Award for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association in 2009. While working for the Chronicle, she began contributing pieces to Science magazine. Hvistendahl’s stories have covered a wide range of topics, including environmentalism, archaeology, biotechnology, and the space program.

While conducting subsequent research in the wake of her observations made in 2000, Hvistendahl discovered a wide gap in the ratios of boys to girls in classrooms throughout Asia. This epiphany inspired her to write her first book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, published in 2011.

The book’s thesis states that the proliferation of modern ultrasound technologies and access to abortions has played a pivotal role in the decision of parents in Asian countries to yield to a preference toward male offspring. According to Hvistendahl’s calculations, more than 160 million women are “missing” as a result of this preference. Hvistendahl attributes sex-selective abortions to the advanced number of social, professional, and economic opportunities afforded to men in developing nations throughout Asia—the result of a historical bias toward men that has continually stifled women’s rights in the region. The book also highlights the widespread use of similar sex-selective abortion practices in non-Asian countries, most notably nations in the Caucasus and the Balkans, as well as among immigrant populations in the United States. Hvistendahl explores the potential issues that a sex-ratio imbalance could lead to, including an increase in the bride buying and sex trafficking already taking place in Asia, as well as the possibility of increased violence and instability in these nations.

Unnatural Selection was praised by scholars, critics, and audiences for its in-depth research and illumination of the topic of sex selection at an international level. The book was a finalist for the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The work also formed the basis of testimony she gave for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in February 2016.

Hvistendahl's second book-length work, And the City Swallowed Them (2014), is a true-crime story about the murder of a Canadian model in China and the murkiness of the Chinese legal system. Unlike its predecessor, however, And the City Swallowed Them received little press.

Hvistendahl received a 2017 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America Foundation to support her work on The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage (2020), about the Federal Bureau of Investigation's monitoring and enforcement of US agricultural patents. Critics responded positively to the work, which, in light of a US-China trade war, proved timely. Publishers Weekly and Booklist gave The Scientist and the Spy starred reviews.

Hvistendahl has spoken and written at length about sex selection and other issues related to science, culture, and government policy. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, the Financial Times, the New Republic, Popular Science, Scientific American, Wired, Technology Review, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. A contributing editor and China bureau chief for Science magazine from 2011 to 2014 and regular correspondent from 2015 to 2018, she also sat on the advisory board of Round Earth Media, an initiative that promotes international journalism. She also cofounded the Deca writer cooperative. In 2020, Hvishtendahl published her third work: The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espianoge.

Impact

In her research for Unnatural Selection, Mara Hvistendahl was the first to uncover a connection between Cold War–era American politics and the issue of sex selection in modern Asia. While her book acknowledges the cultural preference for a son to care for his parents in their old age, it also points to efforts of American scientists and thinkers as a major influence. The ultrasound was first employed in the examination of pregnant women in the late 1950s; the United States funded its use in developing countries, and abortion was encouraged for population control. Similarly, Hvistendahl connected domestic American electoral politics, surveillance, geopolitical trade tensions, and agricultural innovation in unexpected ways in The Scientist and the Spy.

Hvistendahl’s work in the arena of population science and gender studies, in particular, has made her an important contemporary voice. She continues to speak and write about related topics, appearing as a guest on television and radio programs and offering editorial criticism of related works.

Personal Life

For eight years, Mara Hvistendahl lived in Shanghai, China. She married architectural designer Aksel Çoruh and had a daughter. She later moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Bibliography

Cunningham, Maura Elizabeth. “It’s a Boy.” Rev. of Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl. Time 4 July 2011: 47. Print.

Hvistendahl, Mara. “Are the World’s Women Disappearing?” Interview by Mandy Van Deven. Salon. Salon Media, 12 June 2011. Web. 25 July 2013.

Hvistendahl, Mara. “Author Interview: ‘No Girls’ Policies Lead to Troubling Imbalance.” Interview by Christy DeSmith. Star Tribune [Minneapolis]. Star Tribune, 15 June 2011. Web. 25 July 2013.

Hvistendahl, Mara. “160 Million Missing Girls.” Interview by J. Gabriel Boylan. Boston Globe. New York Times, 5 June 2011. Web. 25 July 2013.

Last, Jonathan V. “The War against Girls.” Rev. of Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl. Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones, 24 June 2011. Web. 25 July 2013.

Nathan, Andrew J. "The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espianoge." Foreign Affairs, June 2020, www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2020-04-14/scientist-and-spy-true-story-china-fbi-and-industrial-espionage. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

NPR Staff. “In Asia, the Perils of Aborting Girls and Keeping Boys.” NPR Books. National Public Radio, 15 June 2011. Web. 25 July 2013.