Joanne Ramos knows she’s living what is supposed to be the American dream.

Her family moved to Wisconsin from the Philippines when she was 6, and they worked hard, and she worked hard, and her resume is evidence that everything works like it’s supposed to: Midwest middle-class to Princeton; Princeton to Wall Street. “Without any explicit memories of my parents saying to me, ‘You’re expected to move on and move up,’ we always kind of knew it,’ ” she says. And she did, and her presence—an anomaly in the world of high finance­—only proved that the system worked, how you can, if you’re smarter and work harder, gain access to a rarified world. “I was taking private jets everywhere; there was a private chef that made us meals. It was really kind of a mind-blowing experience.”

And isn’t that the national promise? That you can come here and work hard and climb up? “Most of my life, I’ve been told I was the American dream,” she says. “But at Princeton, I was like, what does that mean?” It was clear to her, for the first time, that the playing field wasn’t equal, that there are various roads that lead to America’s most elite institutions, and some have to do with “deserving” things and some don’t, at all. And then she moved into finance and it struck her again: “Do I deserve this nicer lifestyle because I made it to finance?” she asked herself. She’d worked hard, yes, but wasn’t it also a function of luck?

It was a question she couldn’t resolve and couldn’t escape. By her 30s, she was the one raising a family in Manhattan, and she was the one whose kids had all kinds of advantages. “What does it mean to be a meritocracy, when certain kids at such a young age get so much more? Including my kids, because all of sudden, I was in this world.” It struck her, too, around then, that the only Filipinas who were part of her day-to-day life in New York were “caregivers, nannies, baby nurses, all the people I got to know in my new orbit of being at the parks and the playgrounds.” But they were employees, and she was an employer, and that difference didn’t make any particular sense to her either.

“I don’t know if all immigrant communities are like this, but certainly in the Filipino community, you celebrate other Filipinos’ success,” she says. Some of the nannies she’d gotten to know had since become friends and “would say to me, ‘You’ve made it, we’re so proud of you!’ And I just…I questioned that.” Because they’d made it, too, hadn’t they? They were also here, in New York, “working as hard as I ever had,” Ramos says. “It’s a very different path because of luck and happenstance as much as merit.” And so she was thinking about all that when she sat down to write what would become The Farm.

Jane, the Filipina immigrant at the heart of the book, isn’t lucky. A young single mother with a 6-month-old, she’s living with her cousin, Ate, an enterprising baby nurse, at a dorm in Queens. Ate understands what Jane doesn’t about the intimate dynamics of domestic labor, and when Jane loses a plum nannying job, it is Ate who has a solution: Golden Oaks, a luxury facility housing surrogates carrying the children of the ultraelite. The money is too good to pass up—game-changing money—and so Jane leaves her daughter with Ate, nine months away for the promise of a better life. Are most of the surrogates low-income immigrants of color? Yes, but not all. Is it exploitation? Mae Yu, the ambitious Chinese-American MBA whose career rests on the venture, doesn’t think so. As she explains to one potential “premium” host—a white, pretty Duke graduate with moral reservations—it’s simply free trade, which is, by definition, mutually beneficial. “It isn’t like we force our Hosts to be Hosts,” Mae says. “They choose to work for us freely—I’d argue: happily. They’re treated extremely well, and they’re compensated more than adequately for their efforts.”

“I wanted it to be a world that was immersive, so people could really sink into it and then come out of that world at the end of the book, and say ‘Huh, that made me feel uncomfortable, and yet it’s only inches away from the world we’re in now,” Ramos says. It’s not a dystopian novel; it’s just reality turned up half a notch.

Ramos hadn’t written a novel before. She hadn’t, in fact, written any fiction in 20 years. “It just wasn’t in my head that you could do that,” she says. When she left finance, it was for financial journalism. “I was too scared to go into writing fiction,” she says. Except then she turned 40. “I was like, What do I really want to do?” she recalls. “Do I really need to prove myself anymore? And the answer was no, I just wanted to try writing about all this.”

And she’d been trying to write about “all this,” with “stories about dog walkers to wealthy people, or nannies, or an Amazon fulfillment center, and it just wasn’t working.” Then she happened upon a brief article in the Wall Street Journal about surrogacy in India, and it unlocked a whole world. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Ramos says. “I really wanted to talk about not just inequality, but how we fail to see each other when we have such different lives.” She was thinking about her own position, being someone “who can hire a Filipina nanny.” She was thinking about what it would be like to leave your own child “halfway around the world” so you could support them by taking care of someone else’s. And she had her way in.

There aren’t any villains in The Farm, not really. “It’s a work of fiction meant to explore the mythology of a country that has given me everything. Everything,” Ramos says. It’s a book about surrogacy, but it’s not a book about surrogacy; surrogacy is a vehicle for the question, not the question itself. The question is bigger than that. At its core, it’s a book about capitalism, the promise of upward mobility, and the costs that make it possible. “Do things change?” Ramos wants to know. “If you’re coming to this country, if you’re someone from the bottom, can things change? Does the dream still work? Does it work for a few of us enough to…distract from the fact that it doesn’t work for most of us?”

At the risk of a spoiler: She doesn’t have the answers. But still, she’s obsessed with the questions. “If anything, they’re even farther from being resolved.”

The day we talk, like the world had planned it, the news is saturated with headlines about the college admissions scandal, in which wealthy parents were found to have paid millions of dollars in bribes to get their kids spots at elite colleges, and it’s shocking not because we didn’t know the system was rigged, but because it’s so rare to see the rigging laid bare. “Had I made it up in the book, it would have sounded stupid. Like, Ehhhh, that’s a bit much,” Ramos laughs. “I could have written another book on that and fictionalized it and explored many of the same issues, right?”

Rachel Sugar is a writer living in New York.