CHAPTER 4

The Philippines: At the World’s Service

The lineup at Manila’s United Nations light rail station snakes all the way from the platform, down three flights of stairs and across at least a block of Taft Avenue, a major thoroughfare in this capital city of about 1.7 million residents. (Manila is one of sixteen cities and one municipality that make up Metro Manila, which has a population of nearly twelve million.) Guidebooks and websites written with the young and the adventurous in mind advise visitors to avoid the LRT system during rush hour. Roughly speaking, that will be from seven in the morning to ten in the evening. Almost every hour of the day is rush hour here.

Even by Manila’s standards, the crowd at the United Nations station seems exceptionally dense on this Tuesday afternoon in January. A security guard at a café on the ground level of the Times Plaza building on United Nations Avenue believes most commuters are on their way home from the training centre on the third and fourth floors of this heaving business complex. The Magsaysay Center for Hospitality and Culinary Arts (MIHCA) forms part of the Magsaysay enterprise, which trains young Filipinos for a range of careers, from bartending to seafaring.

There’s a certain irony in locating the headquarters of this career factory on a street named after the world assembly. You won’t find the world in Manila, but Manileños, as citizens of Manila are known, can be found in many of the countries that make up the United Nations. And the various campuses of the Magsaysay Center have earned a reputation as trusted and employment-focused gateways to a national Filipino fantasy: landing a job in the service or hospitality sector outside the country. MIHCA has established itself as the finishing school for the hundreds of thousands of maids, cooks, bartenders and waiters in hotels, on cruise ships and in high-end and franchise restaurants around the world. Its recruitment slogan, placed alongside pictures of towel-carrying maids and cocktail-serving bartenders, captures the aspirational nature of service head-on: “Live Your Dream. Aspire MIHCA.”

For a few hours this afternoon, I learned why exporting labour has become the Philippines’ chief economic and political strategy and its main reputation on the world stage, sometimes leading to dicey international encounters. The execution of Filipina domestic worker Flor Contemplacion in Singapore in 1995 for the murder of another domestic and a local child pitted the two countries against each other, forcing important changes in the regulation of overseas migration in the Philippines. In 1998, the country’s then president, Joseph Estrada, vigorously protested a Greek publisher’s plan to include the word “Filipineza” in a dictionary as synonym for a domestic servant or helper.

Neither national pride nor stories of European insensitivities to brown migrants seem to preoccupy students in instructor Roger Ballesteros’s class in the housekeeping services program, a full-time, five-month course that includes five hundred hours of OJT (on-the-job training). It’s one of seven streams from which prospective students may choose. Housekeeping and the seven-month culinary arts program are the most popular ones on the curriculum. Students can add to their bag of service tricks by enrolling in the shorter Barista 101 (three weeks on the “art and science of coffee preparation”) or the two-week Flairtending 101 (think Tom Cruise behind the bar in Cocktail). Bartenders with flair draw crowds on cruise ships, I’m told.

This particular day is the second in a week-long module on making beds. The lesson starts in the classroom every weekday morning and moves in the afternoons to a glassed corner of the centre, designed to replicate a twin room in a five-star hotel. In today’s class, each student will learn the art of making a bed in just under three minutes.

Since it’s early in the training, Ballesteros has paired students and given each team five minutes to fluff the pillows, take off and tuck in a loose bedsheet, tidy up the bedskirt, add another sheet and cover the whole thing with a duvet. Later classes will go over dusting, vacuuming and bathroom cleaning, laying the foundations for a related segment on laundry and household chemicals (detergents, air fresheners, cleaning liquids, etc.) that these students will start in a few weeks. By the end of this module, students should be able to clean any hotel room or cabin on a cruise ship from top to bottom in twenty-five minutes or less, depending on the size. Suites and executive rooms may take longer.

Ballesteros worked his way through the hospitality industry, from bellboy to management, in a thirty-four-year career spent entirely in the Philippines—a rarity in this sector. The time has come, he tells me, to share his professional knowledge and prepare the next generation of Filipino housekeepers and hotel staff. Although his time-keeping methods may suggest a taskmaster, Ballesteros runs his class with an avuncular touch. He knows that almost all his students want jobs outside the country, and he takes pride in sending them out into the world as ambassadors of Filipino-branded hospitality, which goes way beyond mere service with a smile. Students here are trained—indoctrinated, even—to defer to and please guests. I’ve never heard the words “Thank you, sir” uttered more frequently or with as big a smile as I have while visiting the centre.

German, Italian and Japanese cruise ships have become the biggest employers of the centre’s graduates. The students’ rigorous training, command of English and servility attract potential employers. No one at the centre refers to servility as a learning outcome (at least not explicitly), but it’s easy to get more than a whiff of it in Manila’s restaurants, bars and shops. To Filipinos, service is a calling, a passion—not a joe job. Leisure cruises are big business in the West and Asia, targeting an aging and retired population with time on its hands and money in its cargo shorts, and Filipinos have risen to the challenge, churning out generations of staff to cater to passengers’ every whim.

In some parts of Asia, the demand for hospitality staff outpaces the supply. High-end restaurants in Singapore routinely close sections and turn away customers to maintain service standards in the face of chronic labour shortages. Singapore’s Manpower Ministry estimated that there were 6,400 unfilled jobs in the food-and-beverage service sector in September 2014. The Philippines tops the list of nations from which Singapore imports workers in that field. For now at least, it looks like students in the culinary arts program have a shot at a decent job in Singapore, assuming they abandon their fascination with cruise ships and get over the city’s reputation for exacting standards in service. Filipinos already working in the hospitality industry describe Singaporeans as anything from tight-assed to sadistic. (The ghost of Flor Contemplacion still haunts Singapore-bound Filipinos, even the young ones I talked to informally.)

But cruise ships remain the number-one choice of almost everyone at the centre. I ask Ballesteros to explain the appeal of working on them. I would have thought that students would view a lifetime of cruising seas and oceans without any of the privileges of being a passenger more a punishment than a preference. “They want to see the world,” he tells me, “and they can earn much more there than land-based contracts.” He has one eye on our conversation and the other on the timer on his mobile phone so he can ensure that the two students making the bed in front of him do not go over the five-minute limit. Ballesteros explains that it’s part pursuit of adventure on the high seas and part hand-me-down fantasy. None of the students have left the Philippines or been aboard a ship before, but they’ve heard friends and neighbours—and strangers on radio and TV—tell tales of seeing the world while making a living and (as is always the case) sharing their paycheques with their families.

A handful of students nod in agreement with their instructor’s views. “You’re not tied to one boss or one country,” says a young man with classic nerdy-chic glasses; in any other context, I would have cast him as a hipster who is more likely to stay in boutique hotels than clean rooms in them. Another says that leaving her family for extended periods of time gives her the perfect balance between independence and duties to parents or siblings.

There’s roughly a fifty-fifty split of men and women in the hospitality program, while men dominate in the culinary arts classes. Virtually all are in their early to middle twenties at the oldest. In fact, the program doesn’t accept applicants over thirty-five. Service is for the young. Filipinos often talk of how being young and attractive can mean the difference between a dream life and a nightmare existence in working abroad. Although the Philippines considers English an official language, command of it varies among students in the centre, depending on social background and level of education. By the time they graduate, all trainees will be comfortable enough to conduct a basic conversation with a hotel guest or a passenger on a ship. Language classes are offered to those who need it, at an extra (but small) cost.

At Ballesteros’s request, two students who are clearly this cohort’s strongest demonstrate an art form that I, never having been on a cruise ship, didn’t know existed: folding towels into the shapes of animals. Mae and Kim fold, twist and arrange two towels to make them look like an elephant. They and other students then tackle a new set of towels, turning them into rabbits and dogs. Towel folding was covered in the previous week’s module, and students whose work today falls short of standards aboard luxury liners receive an exasperated look from their instructor.

“But what’s the point of spending so much time setting up towels in animal shapes when guests are likely to pull them apart to wash their hands or faces?” I blurt out. The question is out before I realize that I’m essentially suggesting he’s training them to do something that’s a waste of time. “It’s there to please the guests,” Ballesteros responds instantly. I should have known. These brown men and women aim to please their future Japanese, Western and Arab masters.

Pleasing the taste buds of strangers is the order of the day over at the culinary arts program, where my tour continues. Starting with basics like knife skills, butchery and sanitation, future chefs and wait staff learn how to prepare and serve a variety of Asian and Western meals. Today’s lesson is soup, specifically a purée of celery, creamy carrots and mushrooms. Filipino cuisine hardly makes a showing on the course list, I note. The goal, I’m told, is to cater (literally and metaphorically) to the appetites of other nationals and not the domestic market.

The Philippines as a nation takes pride in providing the people power necessary for the economic development of the world outside its borders. As I watch the culinary arts students wiping off a kitchen counter, I have an image of the brown worker as the world’s global servant, a permanent downstairs resident to affluent upstairs citizens of various skin colours and ethnicities. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino maids, room service attendants, chefs, receptionists and bellboys keep the world’s hospitality industry ticking along, on land and at sea. Others build the salons and spa retreats that employ their brown compatriots as masseurs and physical therapists. Ever since the late 1960s—more on that history in a moment—when the government began thinking of its people as its biggest export and revenue source, a debate has been raging in the Philippines about the social and economic impact of the migrant worker. Can a country incorporate the identities of those who have left it behind, sometimes for decades or on a permanent basis, into its nation-building project in the same way it does their remittances into its GDP?

Speak to any young Filipino of even modest educational background and you’ll get one of two views. The first is that working abroad leads to career and salary boosts that benefit the migrants and their dependants in monetary and emotional terms. The second sees it not as an option but as the harsh economic reality of present-day Philippines, a poor country with massive wealth gaps between the rich and the desolate. Workers sign up to a life of servitude and, as some commentators insist, new forms of slavery. What blacks were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the United States and Indian indentured labourers were in the nineteenth century to British and French imperial powers, Filipinos have become in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This time, however, their masters don’t govern one nation or preside over a single European imperial project. Globalization is their new master. While in broad strokes Filipinos are no different from Sri Lankan or Indonesian workers, they stand apart in sheer numbers and in the way their government has turned their labour into a tightly regulated and overprotected national industry.

When you have more brown people than you know what to do with, why not ship them out?

ALTHOUGH THE WHOLESALE EXPORT of Filipino workers began in earnest in the 1970s, the history of labour migration in the Philippines goes back centuries, to the country’s earliest encounters with colonialism. Historians of migration suggest that native sailors (then known as indios) took part in Spanish-run expeditions to the northern and southern regions of the Pacific as early as the 1570s. Manilamen, as these sailors came to be known, would become a fixture of American, Japanese and British vessels throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. As Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr. points out in Migrant Revolution, his vital collection of essays about Filipino migrant workers, US colonialism of the Philippines in 1898 ushered in a new phase in the country’s labour history, as locals were recruited to work on American navy ships and on sugar plantations in Hawaii. The Philippines’ current reputation as the country with the largest number of seafarers (with Indonesia and China in a distant second and third) builds on centuries of tradition and the professionalization of maritime life. The export of plantation workers in the early twentieth century gave way to service-oriented labour in the Philippines in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

A collision of factors inside and outside the Philippines helped seal the migration deal of the century. When oil prices shot up after the 1973 crisis, the economies of the Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and, to a lesser extent, Oman) experienced unprecedented growth. Many of these countries had just entered the world stage a few years earlier, when Britain handed over control of its former colonies to Western-friendly royal families and governments. Work on major infrastructure projects, as well as an expansion of residential and commercial sites, meant importing virtually all the necessary labour, from supervisors and logisticians to cleaners and cooks to prepare food for the thousands of workers housed dormitory-style on the cities’ outskirts. Work was plenty but workers few.

Enter the Philippines.

Aguilar Jr. suggests that both private and government employers preferred non-Muslim workers from South and Southeast Asia over other Arab and Muslim workers. The predominantly Christian Filipino workers, for example, were less likely to meddle in or stoke sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, or to take part in Arab politics, especially the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. (The Philippines is Asia’s only largely Christian nation, with Catholicism as the main denomination.) But many Filipinos believe another factor has been at the heart of their popularity among other South and Southeast Asian citizens: their fairer shade of brown (compared to the very dark brown of, say, Bangladeshi, Indian and Sri Lankan workers). Command of English is another reason for preferential treatment. In general, Asian workers stood out ethnically and were therefore easier to monitor and keep control of than their Arab colleagues, who could blend in with the local populations of the Gulf. Authorities can instantly spot runaway South Asian construction workers if they’re found outside the sites they are bused to daily.

This burst of economic activity in the Gulf was replicated in other countries in Southeast Asia, with Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia in particular experiencing both a growth in GDP and chronic labour shortages, particularly in lower-paid, unskilled sectors. Internal migrants (those travelling from the countryside to urban centres) gravitated toward the industrial and manufacturing sectors, leaving jobs in domestic service and sanitation to less fortunate Asian nationals. A Filipina maid or nanny in Singapore or Malaysia was a symbol that her—and domestic work still is a predominantly female profession, with women representing 83 percent of those workers abroad—employers had solidified their position as middle class. Many historians of the Filipino culture of migration also point out the colonial legacy of employing servants of a different race; in effect, many affluent Asians were restaging scenes from their childhoods but casting themselves in the role of their (former) British masters.

At the time of this boom in Asian and Gulf economies, many Western countries with long histories of settling newcomers eased or dismantled their European-based immigration policies. Canada, Australia and New Zealand no longer identified European or white heritage as the main qualification for immigrants wanting to start a new life within their borders. This ushered in waves of immigration from the market-dominant Asians in East Africa and the Caribbean, as well as newcomers from Southeast Asia. The brown advance on the New World begins with this set of colour-blind immigration reforms.

In these countries and elsewhere in Western Europe and the United States, women began to enter or return to the workforce in unprecedented numbers, disrupting men’s monopolies on several professions. Many women sought hired help to deal with domestic chores that patriarchy and tradition had assigned them. The 1980s in particular witnessed the return of the domestic servant to middle-class households in several Western democracies, decades after their postwar disappearance. Again, Filipina workers filled that labour gap, performing roles—nanny, cook, cleaner—that had traditionally come within the purview of the “lady of the house.” It was a win-win situation. Western and Asian women held on to their gains within the market economy while maintaining the facade of bourgeois domesticity. Filipina domestic workers earned enough to remit a few dollars to their families back home to help them through a deteriorating and corrupt economic and political system—the very thing that had driven the women to seek work abroad in the first place.

Which brings us to living conditions inside the Philippines in the 1970s, when the current wave of migration began. While the country’s political and economic situation was complex, several commentators place the blame for what went wrong at the feet of one man: former president Ferdinand Marcos, who came into power in 1965 and controlled the nation for twenty-one years, nine of them under martial law. The sharp rise in oil prices in 1973 derailed an economy that had already begun to suffer from the twin blows of increased population and unemployment on the one hand, and political unrest from left-leaning activists and Muslim separatists on the other. For the first half of the 1970s, the economy grew at 2 percent annually, a respectable performance in its own right but one that paled in comparison to the rates of growth in Singapore or Malaysia at the same time.

Worse, the Marcos government squandered that modest growth on lavish re-election campaigns and quelling internal attacks from the political left and right. From 1972 until 1981, Filipinos lived under martial law—nearly a decade during which Marcos’s regime ramped up its political and economic cronyism, giving select members of the president’s inner circle a monopoly on the nation’s industry and resources. Political opponents were silenced, tortured or killed. In 1983, opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. was assassinated at what was then Manila International Airport (it’s now named after him) seconds after returning to the Philippines from three years of political exile in the US. His death at what many observers suspect were Marcos’s orders laid the foundation for the revolution that would ultimately depose the dictator in 1986.

The political uncertainty during Marcos’s reign and the fact that economic benefits accrued to only a tiny minority of the population—those catering to Marcos and his shoe-hoarding wife, Imelda—forced both working- and middle-class Filipinos to seek positions abroad. To Marcos, exporting his countrymen and -women was a way of capitalizing on the Philippines’ overpopulation while simultaneously relieving his government of the need to spend on development projects and social assistance for the masses. Migrant workers would remit money from their salaries, the thinking went, to care for the poor and vulnerable in their families or immediate communities. Aguilar Jr. sums up the societal function of this mass exodus brilliantly: “If Philippine society was ever a cauldron about to boil over, overseas migration has taken the lid off and released the pressure.”

And migration’s role in taking the pressure off continues to this day. Despite rosier economic data and relatively more stable political conditions, the Philippines remains a staggeringly poor country, especially when compared with the more robust economies of its ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) neighbours. According to the country’s Centre for Migrant Advocacy, one-quarter of the population, or about twenty-three million people, lives on less than US$1.35 a day. An estimated 10.5 million Filipinos (out of a population of nearly one hundred million) temporarily or permanently work outside the country. For young people in the Philippines, migration may well be their only hope. In the second quarter of 2015, unemployment among Filipinos aged fifteen to twenty-four stood at 16 percent, more than double the national average of 6.4 percent. Government surveys of school-age children have revealed that 40 to 50 percent expressed a strong desire to work abroad. The number increases for children or close relatives of migrants, who often act as informal recruiters for members of their family. The education system, with its emphasis on maintaining command of the English language, is partly designed to facilitate employment abroad. The curriculum more or less inculcates in others the value of service.

Nationalist and upper-middle-class Filipinos have taken strong positions on the transformation of the country into the world’s largest human-resources department. Charges of a brain drain resurface every few years in the national media. While unskilled labourers are seen as dispensable, trained professionals are not—those lost to other countries have put human development on hold and lives at risk. As demand for caregivers and nurses in Western nations has increased—an example of how an aging population in the developed world affects life in developing countries—many locally trained doctors have chosen to go back to school to obtain nursing degrees in order to land jobs in overseas hospitals or private clinics.

This flow of migrants continues despite headline-grabbing stories of the exploitation, abuse and even murder of Filipino workers, particularly in the Gulf and Middle East. An estimated twelve thousand Filipino workers were trapped in Syria in the spring of 2011, in the early months of the uprising that turned into a full-fledged civil war. The majority have since been repatriated, but many lost either their lives or their savings. The migrant Filipino worker has been compared to both a modern-day pilgrim and a slave. Yet there’s no consensus among Filipinos on who’s enslaving whom—and how voluntary this so-called voluntary migration really is when you take into consideration the socio-economic realities of today’s Philippines.

WALK THROUGH THE INTERCONNECTED Glorietta and Greenbelt malls in Makati City, five kilometres east of Manila, and you’ll understand why consumer demand accounts for 70 percent of the GDP in the Philippines. Shopping is more than a business or a necessity in Asia’s booming economies; it has evolved into an art form, a way of life. Come 5 p.m., thousands of shoppers and window browsers descend on malls in Hong Kong, Taipei, Bangkok or Singapore and hang out there until closing time at 9 or 10 p.m. Sometimes they’re shopping for a new item of clothing or yet another smartphone (most of my Asian friends own at least two phones, one for work and the other for personal calls or dating apps). Other times a mall becomes a place to spend time with friends and family. Unlike malls in North America, which tend to be associated with urban sprawl, rowdy teenagers and the less discerning end of consumerism, the Asian equivalents serve as destinations, the perfect spot for an evening or day out. At the very least, Asian malls offer a break from the blazing sun or the humidity of the afternoon.

The malls in Makati City serve all these purposes, and more. My visit to the Philippines in early 2015 coincided with Pope Francis’s, and the main court of Glorietta 3 had been cleared to provide continuous coverage of his trip on a jumbo screen. About two hundred Manileños interrupted their shopping to watch his arrival in the city on a Thursday afternoon. It was a moment in the life of modern-day Philippines where Catholicism and consumerism seemed inseparable. Shortly after the telecast ended, shoppers wiped away their tears, said their final prayers and continued their search for a bargain or a place to eat before heading home, preferably before closing time to avoid the traffic that accompanies this nightly exodus.

Makati, a former swampland that has been developed into a business and commercial centre, is what the Philippines wants visitors to see when they come to the capital city. With its concentration of corporate headquarters, five-star hotels and high-rise luxury condominiums, Makati looks indistinguishable from Hong Kong or Singapore. It remains one of the safest districts in Metro Manila—the only one whose streets I felt comfortable walking alone in at night. The fact that security guards with machine guns stand outside hotels, businesses and malls to protect visitors and locals both confirms that sense of safety and draws attention to the potential of crime. Makati offers an aspirational fantasy for middle-class Manileños, who escape the poverty and crime of Manila proper by hanging out in its malls and parks. It also serves as a reminder of the disparity in incomes and quality of life here. Look at the lineups for the Jeepneys—those distinctly Filipino communal buses made of refurbished military Jeeps or Japanese vehicles—and you’ll get a sense of how those working in downtown Makati struggle to get to and from their jobs. Waiting in the glare of a Gucci or a Guess store sharpens the contrast even more.

In his short story “Aviary,” included in the anthology Manila Noir, San Francisco–based writer Lysley Tenorio taps into the contradictions (and menace) of mall life in Makati. The first-person narrator captures the experiences of a group of young men from the shanties who descend on Makati after hearing of a sign outside the Greenbelt mall that reads “Poor People & Other Disturbing Realities Strictly Prohibited.” After an afternoon of thugging their way in and out of stores the narrator can’t help mocking for having “nonsensical” names (Bvlgari) or others that “sound like a sneeze” (Jimmy Choo), the men place a fake bomb in the mall’s chapel to inflict damage on the management. “We will have created unease here, severe emotional distress,” concludes the narrator in the tale’s final paragraph. Even the revenge fantasy of the powerless takes place against a backdrop of commercialism, and on one level revels in it.

The narrator captures something else I noticed in my evening mall walks: as he and his friends go up and down the escalators, he points out that “these are the whitest Filipinos we have ever seen.” You only see darker-skinned Filipinos working in low-end chain stores or as waiters in cheap or moderately priced eateries. The fancier the store, the lighter the skin of the sales staff. Initially I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, forcing me to see light and dark skins where I wanted them to be. But after reading Tenorio’s story, I went back to test his narrator’s observation, and by and large, it checked out.

I also had another mission in mind: finding an authentic Filipino restaurant close to the malls. Two local men who’d worked in the service industry overseas for many years before returning to Manila had agreed to share their experiences with me over lunch. I found only two or three spots, however—locals flock to American and Japanese joints, leaving Filipino food for visitors like me who want to sample the “real” cuisine of the country. I made a mental note of a place called Dekada, in Glorietta 3, since it billed itself as serving “Historic Filipino Food.” On Saturday afternoon, when I met up with Jonas and Oliver (and their friend Eric, who tagged along), we settled around a big table and started a conversation that would last almost until the dinner rush hit us.

My good friend Roberto, a Filipino-Canadian based in Toronto, introduced me to his two old school buddies from Marikina, another city that makes up Greater Manila. All three reconnected through social media twenty-five years or so after high school, and their stories illustrate, among other things, the differences between temporary Filipino migrant workers and those who manage to start new lives as permanent residents in a country like Canada. While Roberto’s middle-class family relocated to Edmonton in the 1980s, joining the ranks of well-to-do Canadians with all the privileges the First World bestows on its citizens, Oliver’s and Jonas’s parents were rocked by the political and economic turmoil in the Philippines. All three families started as middle class, but only Roberto’s maintained its status or improved on it. By the time Oliver and Jonas started the search for overseas employment, they had no other choice.

Oliver’s life began to change when his mother died unexpectedly in 1990 of cancer, sending his father into the grip of depression. “He started to lose interest in his job, in his life,” says Oliver, an easy-going man in his mid-forties with curly greying hair tied into a man bun. With inconsistent and low income as the new norm, the father started selling the family furniture piece by piece to feed his children. A fifteen-year-old Oliver watched it all unfold—not as a teen but as an adult who now had to step in to provide for his siblings and father. He quit school.

That must have been a difficult decision, I remark as I begin to realize that his story is very different from that of the middle-class high school dropouts I’ve come across in Toronto. Still (and stupidly), I wonder if Oliver had other options and ask him if he considered staying in school and working part time. “We had nothing to eat. I wasn’t able to focus on study. . . . We were penniless.”

For about two years, Oliver earned a living as an assistant in a beauty parlour, sweeping hair off the floor and eventually learning the basics of cosmetic care: makeup, manicure and pedicure. While he didn’t bring home a huge income, he at least earned enough to keep the family from starvation or homelessness. Still, the precariousness of the beauty business—a luxury for even middle-class Filipinas struggling to survive month to month—forced Oliver to follow in the path of millions before him and look for work abroad. With no formal training in the service industry and no high school certificate, he had to explore what was then an in-demand but shady aspect of migration in the Philippines: working as an entertainer in Japan.

Japan had been drawing on Filipino artists to provide musical entertainment for almost a century at that point, with records showing their presence dating back to the late 1880s. The US occupation of the Philippines introduced jazz and swing music to Filipinos, who developed a taste for it. American promoters and music managers began booking Filipino acts in Japan before the Second World War, and the American influence on the Philippines-to-Japan traffic in entertainers continued well into the 1960s.

Perhaps what has changed since then is the definition of the word “entertainer,” an overhaul that hewed the job closer to sex work and away from the performing arts (although a performance of a sort does take place when Filipinas—and like domestic service, this is a line of work where women dominate—and Japanese men meet face to face). Once a Filipina receives an entertainment visa for cultural performance, she’s eligible to work in hostess bars in the rural areas of Japan. In addition to performing cover versions of the latest Western pop music or putting together a burlesque act, she’ll chat up Japanese men, convincing them to order drinks and food with marked-up prices.

It’s a role once played by Japanese women. However, as postwar Japan transformed into an industrial powerhouse (the Japanese Miracle), local women sought other kinds of work, leaving this lowly line of entertainment to migrant women from other countries. Filipino commentators have suggested that Japanese men are acting out a cultural fantasy of über-masculinity by casting the entertainer in the submissive role that traditional Japanese women once filled. The exchange between entertainer and client unfolds as part sexually charged relationship, part historical re-enactment.

That Oliver was a man did not stand in the way of his career as a hostess. Not all female entertainers in Japan are born with the corresponding body parts. In fact, in the 1980s and early 1990s, a subculture of cross-dressing and transvestism thrived within the main entertainment industry. Oliver saw an opportunity and went for it. He applied for a licence to work as an entertainer in Japan after hearing about the high pay and giving up on the dream of making a decent living at home. He says he was about eighteen when he made that decision. To get a licence, Filipino wannabe entertainers have to audition in front of a committee of representatives from the government. Putting the skills learned in Manila’s beauty salons to good use, Oliver performed an amateur drag show that met the committee’s proof of talent. He was issued a visa and assigned to a club in northern Japan. For the first time, he moved away from his family and his country.

Oliver’s early days in Japan were exciting and financially rewarding. Japanese bosses paid the equivalent of US$300 a month (in today’s dollars), a fortune for the eighteen-year-old—even after the recruitment agency took its cut and expenses were subtracted. With this kind of regular income, Oliver was able to send his family nearly half of his take-home pay through remittances. It added up to more than three or four times his best-paid and busiest weeks at the hair salon. Performing hits by Paula Abdul, Whitney Houston and Madonna, the very young Oliver became a favourite in his local hostess bar. Still, his drag act lacked something. Many of his Japanese clients liked women’s body parts on their male-born hostesses. To oblige, Oliver started a course of hormone therapy and underwent breast-implant surgery to give his chest a more authentically female shape. It extended his career as an entertainer and fulfilled the fetishes of the men.

However, the short nature of the government-issued contracts (they were granted for only six months to a year at a time) meant that entertainers had to return regularly to the Philippines and reapply for a new licence. After two extensions, Oliver decided to jettison the formal process and go underground, living in northern Japan for almost six years without an entertainer’s licence or any kind of residence permit. Filipino overseas workers, particularly in Asia, routinely overstay their visas or work illegally, making them vulnerable to unregulated and exploitative employment conditions. Add in what Oliver and others describe as a distinctly Japanese form of xenophobia and you understand why entertainment jobs in Japan overlap with sex trafficking.

“The Japanese treat you like a Third World, third-class country, even though they too are Asians,” says a now teary Oliver. “When Japanese employers know you’ve overstayed, they reduce your salary.” Around 1998, after almost eight years in Japan, Oliver was arrested and deported to the Philippines. He says the prison where he stayed for two months before his deportation felt more like a hostel, with three meals a day, hot showers and recreational facilities. He has never set foot in Japan again but has found work with a recruitment agency that specializes in what’s now the back door to entertainment (or any other) work in Japan for Filipinas: invitational matrimony. Filipinas enter into a marriage arrangement with Japanese men that allows them to work and live in Japan legally.

COMPARED TO OLIVER, JONAS had a less dramatic overseas experience, but he too was forced into it. His father lost everything in the early 1990s when he took out a business loan and failed to repay it. The bank foreclosed on the family’s catering business and threatened to seize their home as well. At seventeen, Jonas faced two options: he could become an entertainer like Oliver or learn the culinary secrets of the old family business. Too rugged (and macho) and lacking the vocal talent to pass the audition for an entertainer, Jonas chose the second option, completing a culinary arts course and maritime training similar to the programs offered by the Magsaysay Center. He combined both to find work as a chef aboard container ships and eventually cruise liners.

For nearly a decade, Jonas worked routes in Asia, with Manila to Singapore as the major one. But in 2003, his life changed when he secured a job on a German cruise ship that sailed from Rotterdam in the Netherlands to Dublin and Cork in Ireland. Jonas abandoned ship once he’d sampled the good life in Dublin while on shore leave. (He managed to “steal” his own passport. It’s common for the ship’s bursar to hold the passports of Filipino mariners to avoid this very scenario.) After months of working under the table in gastro-pubs and pizza parlours in Dublin, he was approached by a man who ran a small hotel and offered him a job cleaning around the establishment. It was work that the middle-class Jonas found “demeaning,” but at ten euros an hour and with restaurant work drying up, he accepted. He recounted in great detail the horror of cleaning other people’s toilets for the first time. At that point, Jonas came to the realization that his middle-class days were behind him for good.

Word of mouth and that trademark Filipino work ethic helped him land various other under-the-table cleaning gigs. He made six hundred euros a week on average and managed to stay off the radar of the Irish authorities for six years. Only in 2010, when his eighty-four-year-old father’s health began to deteriorate, did Jonas return to Manila. He used his savings from many years of cleaning homes and guesthouses to restart the family catering business with one of his brothers.

I ask Oliver and Jonas how they feel about seeing young workers go into potentially harmful or exploitative scenarios. As Oliver pauses to reflect, Jonas steps in, saying: “It’s better than settling for noodles for lunch every day.” A cup of noodles from the local convenience store costs about twenty-five pesos and is still the main meal for millions of impoverished Filipinos. It’s high on sodium and artificial ingredients, causing numerous health problems in the long run.

Oliver agrees with his friend, adding that as long as young people are briefed on the risks, they should be allowed to seek opportunities in Japan or elsewhere. But the two men place as much blame for the exploitation of Filipino migrant workers on their government as they do on unscrupulous bosses in host countries. Jonas compares his government’s relentless promotion of overseas work to the British empire a century or more earlier, shipping thousands of its subjects from one colony to another to undertake major agricultural or infrastructure projects. Oliver sees Filipinos as both the slaves of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the ones enslaving others. He cites greedy and unprofessional recruitment agencies that take larger-than-standard cuts from their employees’ salaries or knowingly send them to work in unsafe conditions.

Yet despite what is effectively a four-decade national debate—are oversees workers slaves or ambassadors for the Philippines?—the number of migrants increases every year. What is it about Filipinos that makes them so at ease in the world? Even Eric, the only one of the three friends who didn’t have to travel (his family held on to its middle-class status), acknowledged that migrants “put their hearts” into their work—something, he says, all Filipinos are raised to do. “Filipino people adapt to a lot of things,” he says. “It starts in the basic unit of the family. The way we were bred is to be closely knit with your family and friends. You serve your family.”

In an exchange of messages a few days earlier, my Toronto friend Roberto had mentioned the role of Catholicism in fostering a culture of self-denial and service to others. I ask the three if this is part of the equation, but Oliver is not convinced. He offers a more secular and commercial interpretation: “When you need money, you have to work. And when you work, you have to please the people you serve.” I suggest that the livelihoods of many Filipinos then depend on that fine line between service and servitude. Jonas agrees but adds that someone attractive and young has a better chance of succeeding abroad; Filipinos directly and indirectly sell more than just their labour. All three believe that a light skin forms an essential part of the attraction. Those with darker skin have to work twice as hard to get ahead in the service industry. Jonas in particular believes customer service workers, whose job involves dealing with people face to face, tend to be selected for their fairer skin. Just like that short story, I note.

But Jonas and Oliver are men—Oliver now identifies as an effeminate gay man, the opposite of “straight acting”—in an enterprise that has long been a “feminized sphere.” The first overseas Filipino workers may have been male seafarers, but the new face of the country’s globetrotting reality is the young female domestic worker, nurse, caregiver or nanny. So much so that I found it jarring to see a Filipina pushing a stroller holding an actual Filipino child or tending to an elderly person who bears a family resemblance. Like many North Americans, I associate Filipinas with serving middle-class and well-to-do families of different ethnicities.

But while women from the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries, notably Sri Lanka and Indonesia, reap the same rewards and experience the same hardships as male workers, the jobs they do put them in a more vulnerable position. Domestic work, the area in which 83 percent of migrant women around the world toil, doesn’t figure in the labour laws of about 40 percent of destination countries, according to a recent report from UN Women. Unlike construction workers or professionals, domestic workers tend to move from job to job informally and without legally binding contracts. This increases their chances of exploitation, abuse or deportation.

The same report estimates that domestic workers account for 7.5 percent of the total number of women in the workforce globally. The number of domestics continues to increase (at least fifty-three million women work in that field, with most coming from Asia) despite the slowdown in the world economy since 2008. Currently and for the first time, women far outnumber men among migrant workers in the Persian Gulf: twelve men for every one hundred women. While domestic work pays less than male-dominated professions, and comes with certain class-based prejudices, studies show that its social impact in countries of origin is greater. Women workers tend to invest more in their communities by supporting not just their immediate family but also initiatives to improve the health and education of children generally or to provide clean water or job training.

Stories of abuse or family estrangement usually drown out the positive side—the empowerment effect—of brown labour. I wanted to find out for myself what happens to the Filipina domestic worker once she leaves her home and accepts employment in another country. Is she a modern-day slave or an emancipated woman earning her keep? How do host societies, particularly in Asia, perceive her as both a woman and a brown-skinned economic migrant? I had to see for myself how her life unfolds inside the homes she cleans and alongside the families for whom she prepares three meals a day. Some answers (and more questions) came to me in Hong Kong, where I closely observed the world of Filipina (and some Indonesian) domestic workers and their daily battles with the colour lines of global labour.