When Yahlin Chang wrote about child separation in The Handmaid’s Tale…
she had no idea how much that subject would hit close to home. “Parents and children were being ripped away from each other at the Mexican border,” Yahlin recalls. “Refugees were being put in cages.”
Yahlin remembers writing similar scenes for the show. “There is a scene with rebellious women being put in these large cages, these holding pens,” she explains. “And they did look like the holding pens that we’re using to jail migrants and refugees.”
The show took the startling imagery even further in an episode called, “The Last Ceremony.” “I wrote the scene where June gets to see her daughter for 10 minutes,” explained Yahlin. “Her daughter has been kidnapped and is now living with new parents. This scene is both a hello and a goodbye.”
When Yahlin wrote this part, she couldn’t imagine that the same scene played out every day in the United States. “I talked to UN experts, psychologists, and international human rights activists,” says Yahlin. “We were talking about things that happen in Laos, Cambodia, the Congo, and Syria. We were talking about these incidents happening all over the world. But I never for one second thought that these scenes would be happening in America.”
The week that the episode aired, news broke that the United States was separating parents and children at the southern border.
“You’d see these scenes on TV of parents and children being ripped away from each other. This was happening in our own country,” Yahlin remembers.
When the uncanny episode aired, Yahlin got a lot of attention from reporters. “Suddenly, my phone was lighting up,” she recalls. “All these reporters wanted to ask me, ‘How did you know this was going to happen?’ And my answer was that we had no idea. We just spent a lot of time asking what would happen if you have the worst people in charge with the worst possible motives. What are the consequences of their horrible and cruel decisions? And so sometimes, our show interacts with the real world in extremely unfortunate ways.”
