CHAPTER 5
Hong Kong: Workers, Women, Mothers
On weekdays, the Hong Kong Bayanihan Kennedy Town Centre looks like the abandoned secondary school it actually is. Its only paid employee, Tess Ubamos, an administrator, spends her days there doing paperwork or arranging for plumbers to deal with drainage issues in the bathrooms or contractors to give the classrooms a fresh coat of paint.
But come the weekend, and especially Sundays, the Bayanihan turns into a social hub for domestic workers in the city. A charitable organization founded in 1993, the centre takes its name from the Filipino word for community spirit. While it opens its doors to domestics of all nationalities, the Bayanihan targets workers from the Philippines and is run by a large volunteer team of them. The Hong Kong government rents the building to a trust at a “cheap, cheap, cheap” rate, says Ubamos, as part of an initiative to offer recreational services for domestic workers. The centre provides a safe space (some may say an escape) for Hong Kong’s domestic workers to learn, express their feelings or simply hang out and do as little as possible. Women who prefer not to spend their one day off picnicking in the Central District’s Victoria Park or exploring the many pedestrian bridges nearby come here for a mix of body-mind-soul tinkering.
The sports-oriented among them take part in weekly volleyball coaching. Judging from the grunts and groans coming from both sides of the net, it’ll be a close call at the spring tournament. The martial arts club provides the release of a contact sport while teaching women basic self-defence. The coach tells me that warding off unwanted sexual advances in Hong Kong is one of the reasons for the high enrolment numbers, but most women are preparing themselves for the rough streets that await them when they return to the Philippines.
I’m at the centre on a Sunday in early April to take part in an art class organized by the Hong Kong University–based social inclusion group We Care HK, a registered NGO that aims to bridge gaps among different ethnicities in the city. Vicky Kung, a graduate student in social work, and Melissa Leung, a journalism major, have invited me to see how they use art practice to connect local Hong Kongers and domestic helpers in a context other than employer-employee, local-foreign.
I was a skeptic going in. Two weeks earlier, the two women had hosted a screening of the 2013 Singaporean film Ilo, Ilo, a story of the bond between a boy and his Filipina nanny set against the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Only a handful of students from Hong Kong University’s residential college Chi Sun (where the screening took place) showed up, and neither Vicky nor Melissa touched on the film’s themes in the post-screening discussion. This Sunday, I made my way to the Bayanihan Centre expecting a similarly dismal turnout and rehearsing excuses to leave early so I could catch up with the Sunday picnics in Central, my best shot at meeting with and talking to a cross-section of helpers in the city.
But the fifth-floor classroom—painted in a kind of bright green you see only in re-creations of the psychedelic sixties in The Simpsons—quickly fills with fourteen Filipina domestic workers and about eight locals (all but one of them female). Ana, an art teacher and therapist of Chinese-Canadian background, starts by explaining the afternoon’s project to a very excitable audience. The first step, she says, involves pairing each worker with a Hong Konger. Since not enough locals have shown up, Ana asks some domestic workers to pair up. The women will begin by taking photos of their partners on a smartphone and emailing them to Melissa, who will print them out. To make the pictures consistent in size, Ana tells the women to think of ID photos. Smart move. It’s a reference that the women should be familiar with, given how many such photos they had to attach to their immigration and employment forms in the Philippines and in Hong Kong.
While the printing takes place, Ana tells the women to get to know their partners by asking questions about their likes and dislikes, taste in music or hidden talents. “Can you sing?” Ana throws that out as an example of a good getting-to-know-you question, probably not realizing Filipinos’ well-documented obsession with karaoke. At home or in one of the country’s thousands of bars and lounges, Filipinos have turned this party favourite into a national pastime. Drawing on her background working with refugees and mentally challenged youth, Ana turns this part of the art class into an empowerment moment, borrowing from the all-women-are-beautiful sentiment of a Dove commercial. She tells her students that most children aged three to five will answer the question about singing in the affirmative. But a teenage girl of thirteen or fifteen will most likely say no. Somehow, women lose their sense of confidence and freedom as they get older, she explains. Heads nod in collective agreement and, I sense, wistfulness. The working lives of these women are so regimented that moments of spontaneity and joy become all too rare.
Once the photos are printed, Ana instructs the women to cut each in half to create a single face made of two different prints. Every pair is then asked to recreate the composite picture on a small canvas, using pencils and, once the outline of the face is clear, watercolours. Nothing that the women paint can possibly be wrong, Ana says, encouraging them to trust their feelings and inner creativity. This explains why her pencils have no erasers. The first stroke of the pencil is the truest—much like English romantic poets of the late eighteenth century believed that the first utterance of a poetic line is its purest rendition. The ultimate goal of this painting session quickly becomes clear: despite some physical differences, Filipinas and local Hong Kongers are one and the same. The illustration on the class’s promotional poster on the We Care Facebook page emphasizes this point, literally—one half of it is painted in yellow hues and the other in brown. Sometimes, it does pay not to be subtle.
The simplicity of the message, however, should not distract from the complexity of life for most of the nearly 330,000 foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong (about 5 percent of its population). According to Helpers for Domestic Helpers, an outreach program of St. John’s Cathedral, in 2014 there were 171,145 Filipinos, 150,053 Indonesians and 7,843 in the other column, which includes Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Indians (“other” not least because they’re ethnically different from both local residents and the women who have held similar jobs for decades).
The segregation begins as soon as the women land at Hong Kong International Airport, where they are asked to join a separate immigration line for domestics. (When they leave Hong Kong, they are also required to go through a different line, this time alongside foreign students.) Once they start working, they face monetary and social inequities. The current minimum monthly wage for a domestic worker is HK$4,110 (US$530). According to the advocacy group HK Helpers Campaign, when pro-rated to a forty-hour week, the pay falls short of Hong Kong’s minimum wage by five dollars in local currency. And most helpers work seventy or eighty hours a week, on average. (The minimum wage increased to HK$32.50, or just over US$4, on May 1, 2015, in effect widening the income gap between foreign domestics and local workers.)
We Care differs from most NGOs and legal advocacy groups in its emphasis on the social lives of the women. The organization spends its energy and activist capital on making the workers feel less invisible and more accepted as women with rich, rewarding and creative inner lives. It leaves the legal and economic heavy lifting to others. Judging by the rapport between the women in the class this afternoon, Vicky and Melissa are on to something. The final paintings may not end up in one of the pricey galleries on the gentrified western edge of Hollywood Road—although some of them are vibrant and show talent—but the room is bursting with energy and laughter. That doesn’t happen frequently enough, at least not from Monday to Saturday.
Mary Grace and Jacquisa, two helpers who’ve been paired up, speak fondly of We Care’s role in their lives, saying the organization treats them as “normal people.” The two women, both from the island province of Cebu, are cheating by painting each other, since they met three years earlier at a training centre in the Philippines before joining their separate employers in Hong Kong. They see each other on Sundays only. They both talk of getting “attitude” from their Chinese employers, but they rationalize their treatment with language that I’ve heard from many of their peers before: “We don’t have the same beliefs or religion,” says Jacquisa. “We don’t know each other.”
Margaret, by comparison, believes that her Hong Kong working conditions are a huge improvement on her previous job in Singapore, where 40 percent of domestic workers still don’t get a full day off a week, despite a change in law that has made it mandatory. “I’m free here,” she says. “Free to study and learn.” She’s taking computer lessons in her spare time. Her sister joined her recently to look after her employer’s three-month-old baby. They share the same room and take different days off: the sister takes Saturdays, while Margaret, now in her third year in Hong Kong, prefers Sundays in order to take part in activities at the Bayanihan Centre, where she’s a member of the bookworm club and the library team.
As I talk to the women in the class, admittedly interrupting their creative flow, I’m reminded of an observation attributed to postwar Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch. Commenting on Turkish migration to Germany in the 1950s, he’s reported to have said, “We asked for workers; we got people.” Nowhere does this intersection between workers and people—employees and human beings with feelings and desires and dreams—show more prominently in discussions of international labour migration than in the lives of female domestic workers. They must negotiate the boundaries between being dutiful, pliant workers and being (predominately young) women with more on their minds than cleaning their masters’ toilets or picking up groceries from the supermarket. They play mother to children to whom they have no blood ties while their own biological sons and daughters grow up in the care of extended families at home. They take on roles normally associated with the wife in the gendered domestic economy: cooking, cleaning, picking up the kids from school. Go to any public or private school in the late afternoon and you’ll see lines of Filipina and Indonesian workers waiting to walk their employers’ children home. Sure, there’s the odd Hong Kong native or Western expat picking up her own children, but you can count them on one hand.
And it’s not just people that domestic workers serve. In the morning or late at night, you’ll see them walking the family’s dog, scooping poop or sprinkling water every time it pees. On Saturdays you can spot groups of them standing outside restaurants, minding the dogs while their employers grab brunch or afternoon drinks. It’s hard not to witness that sight and wonder who’s really being chained to the fence while the masters enjoy their meals. And through it all, they are expected to underplay or completely hide their identities as women, as mothers and as sexual beings. The Madonna-whore, saint-or-prostitute dichotomies cut deep into the lives of Filipinas in Hong Kong in particular, and much of that comes with racially charged and historically complicated undercurrents.
IMMIGRATION EXPERTS VIEW THE arrival of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong in the 1970s as the latest phase in the city’s long history as a “destination of human circulation.” In the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, British, Japanese and mainland Chinese nationals have placed different political claims on Hong Kong. As a centre of international trade, with its location at the Pearl River Delta and the South China Sea, Hong Kong has attracted merchants from the West and the East, including Muslim and Jewish traders who arrived at its shores independently or as sub-agents of the British empire. This former British colony remains a global city and a tourist mecca to this day, almost two decades after the handover to China and despite tensions between its youth and the mainland regime. Filipinos form the largest non-Chinese ethnic group in Hong Kong; in addition to the estimated 171,000 female domestics, there are men in various semi-skilled and skilled positions (gardening, catering and hotel services, for example).
In some ways, Filipinos have benefited from and been subjected to a particular brand of xenophobia that remains prevalent in Hong Kong, despite its global population. In the 1970s, Hong Kong opened its doors to Filipino workers just as it closed them to mainland migrants trying to escape Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The same decade saw Hong Kong’s economy transform from one based on male-dominated manufacturing industries to one based on services such as finance, design, technology—industries in which women participated and thrived.
This new development in the gender distribution of work, solidified in the 1980s and 1990s, created the two-income family, in which both parents worked full time while outsourcing household duties to imported labour. The pace of this outsourcing continues in today’s Hong Kong, dubbed a society of working women by (conservative male) commentators. Statistics back them up. Women account for 53.5 percent of the current workforce, with that figure projected to reach 55.4 percent in 2026. In professional and managerial sectors, where staff members are more likely to work longer hours or have stressful jobs, the number of women has reached 40 percent, according to a 2013 study. When I mentioned my interest in domestic workers to a native Hong Kong financial adviser and mother of two, she told me that she took her annual holidays to coincide with her maid’s—thus, in her own words, turning her responsibilities as a mother from a “vocation to a vacation.” When her Filipina maid of more than a decade comes back from holiday, the mother returns to her office in an imposing tower near Admiralty in the central business district. Like many middle-class and English-speaking Chinese locals, this banker, who asked me not to reveal her name, has a preference for Filipinas over Indonesian or other South Asian women.
Proficiency with the English language, cleanliness, industriousness and pliability are among the usual reasons Hong Kong matriarchs cite for this ethnic preference. Historically speaking, however, Hong Kongers opted for Filipinas (particularly the Malay brown ones, as opposed to those of Chinese descent) because, write Vivienne Wee and Amy Sim, it was “easier to tell them apart.” Workers from mainland China could easily disappear into the local population, where they could threaten stability and capitalist dominance by extolling the virtues of Communism. As I mentioned earlier, the Gulf countries used a similar strategy, giving priority to South and Southeast Asian workers over Arab nationals in order to segregate the ethnically different group more efficiently. In the case of Hong Kong, it was advantage brown. At least initially. Racial and skin-colour discrimination goes to the heart of negative attitudes toward Filipinos in Hong Kong.
Holly Allan, executive director of Helpers for Domestic Helpers (HDH), thinks that belief in the inferiority of darker-skinned workers and an ingrained sense of superiority among Hong Kongers underpin the dynamics she sees every day in her job. Allan tells me that many locals refer to Filipino workers as “locusts” because of their sheer numbers. She’s worked on several cases involving domestics whose contracts were terminated because an employer believed that the woman looked darker than she seemed in her application photos. A dark-skinned domestic worker has the air of a cheap find or damaged goods sold at a discount—impressions that class-conscious employers do not wish to convey. To boss around a dark-skinned Indian or Sri Lankan woman makes for a hollow social victory.
Just before my meeting with Allan in the cramped church basement office of HDH—where one of the volunteers, a white American law student, at first assumed I was a worker with a problem (suggesting that, to some, all brown people look the same)—I witnessed one of her staff members helping a young Filipina with a complaint. She told the staffer that her employer, a night owl, often woke her up at two or three in the morning to do household tasks that could easily wait until the next day. The worker came to HDH to seek clarification on how many hours a day she’s allowed to sleep. It all depends, she’s told, on when she normally goes to bed. What followed was a comic but heartbreaking exchange where the staffer tried to determine what constituted a good night’s sleep. If the worker went to bed early, around 8 or 9 p.m., and was woken up at 3 a.m., that would give her six to seven hours of sleep. Sounds reasonable on paper but wrongheaded by any other measure.
There’s more to these cases than racism, Allan believes. “It’s the materialistic culture of Hong Kong. The value people put on social standing. You’re less of a person because you’re poor.” Allan, a Filipina with an MA in marketing who has lived in Hong Kong since 2000, when she joined her Australian husband, is more middle class than working poor, but her fourteen years with HDH has placed her in the centre of a struggle with pronounced class and ethnic dimensions. While HDH holds regular information and training sessions to make workers aware of their rights, the greater challenge lies in educating the general Hong Kong public about their responsibilities. The NGO relies heavily on volunteers and a large number of Chinese and expat corporate lawyers who provide pro bono services either out of a sense of religious or moral duty or as part of their firms’ social responsibility mandate. International law firms and other corporations take the latter very seriously, and sometimes it’s part of their licensing agreement with the Hong Kong government. Goldman Sachs, for example, sponsors a regular program where female workers take assertiveness training.
Allan is optimistic that, in time, attitudes among the Chinese population will change. She cites an increase in the number of local high school and university students who are currently completing academic projects on the subject. Like me, many of them ask to interview her. Shortly after our chat, she gave a presentation to sixteen students—most of them from the law school of Hong Kong University (a class on business law)—on the problems faced by domestic workers in the community and the many ways HDH helps. When I asked, only three students said their families had employed domestic workers while they were growing up. Almost all of them seemed genuinely surprised that discrimination on such a wide level took place, probably in their neighbours’ or relatives’ homes.
While racial and class prejudices apply to migrant labourers of various nationalities and both sexes, female domestic workers from the Philippines must also contend with their gender, which provokes ambiguous and sometimes hostile reactions from both men and women in Hong Kong. As their numbers swelled, debates about their moral character got louder.
To middle- and upper-class Hong Kongers, Filipina women conjure images of prostitution, a legacy of the country’s history as an American military base. To this day, the red light district of Wan Chai parades sex workers from various European, Asian and African nations, including a large number of Filipinas (referred to as “little brown Eskimos” in George Adams’s comedy The Great Hong Kong Sex Novel). Then and now, this association of Filipinas with the sex trade has cast them as a “moral threat” to the purity of the family. As evidence of a lapse in their ethical code and a sign of weak familial bonds, the Hong Kong media occasionally cite the fact that Filipinas leave behind their own children and families, especially their husbands, to look after their employers’.
Complicating the picture of domestic workers as providers of home service are comparisons between them and older (and now largely extinct) forms of family-based childcare in Hong Kong. The grandparents of current working families still recall being raised by sohei (sworn spinsters) or mui tsai (little sisters). The latter refers to young women sold by their poor parents to wealthy Chinese families as domestics, in arrangements that suggest both sex trafficking and child labour. These virginal and highly idealized examples of womanhood have cast a shadow on their successors, the caregiver and nanny from a more impoverished country and with a darker skin. The nature of domestic service invites workers to enter the private, intimate lives of the family, for which they get paid and are resented. They enter spaces generally considered off limits to strangers, such as the bedroom and bathroom. Even the simple act of washing clothes brings them in close contact with the lives (and private parts) of their employers. One domestic worker at Central’s pedestrian bridge told me that she was often asked to hand-wash underwear smeared with menstrual blood or traces of the husband’s semen. Another dreaded bathing her employer’s aging father, who liked to stroke his penis, pretending to clean it, while she washed his hair. (To be fair, she cited that case more as an example of a funny occupational hazard than sexual harassment. Grandpa is almost ninety, and the worker is not sure he’s aware she’s a woman.)
As Kimberly A. Chang and Julian McAllister Groves suggest in their study of sex among domestic workers in Hong Kong, some workers distance themselves from the image of the Filipina as a sexual and morally ambiguous character by “embracing their identities as wives, mothers and daughters of migrant families.” Filipino workers deny themselves any activities or accoutrements that may signal their material or sexual sides. They dress so conservatively they can be mistaken for Muslim women from Indonesia or Pakistan. They decorate their private spaces—they’re not always separate rooms—at their employers’ homes with mementos of their families in an attempt to reclaim their identities as devoted mothers, wives or daughters. Others build new attachments with their employers’ families, unwittingly creating tensions and turf wars over children’s (and sometimes husbands’ or even wives’) affections.
A recent study by a researcher in Singapore measuring the correlation between hiring domestic help and the well-being of Chinese couples in Hong Kong suggests that the effects are far from substantial. The rationale for hiring foreign workers includes improving family well-being and increasing leisure time between couples and among the family as a whole, but the study found that a full-time worker may actually “bring new conflict to families because sexual tensions or suspicions may arise.”
While the above study focused on the employers, a substantial body of research—and advocacy work on the level of NGOs and international labour organizations—has put the spotlight on the psychological lives of female migrants as they juggle their identities as workers on one the hand and mothers, lovers or wives on the other. It’s generally accepted that domestic workers must leave their own children at home, but their status as mothers becomes complicated when they get pregnant, by choice or accident, while working in Hong Kong. Most face contract termination, even though it is illegal. Some get desperate, choosing to abort the child or run away from their employers, becoming even more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
PathFinders, a Hong Kong NGO devoted to protecting migrant mothers and their children, estimates that there are about six thousand women in this subgroup. In its 2014 annual report, it says that 621 mothers and their children benefited from its support. Sixty-eight percent of those women were from Indonesia, 28 percent the Philippines and 4 percent other nations. The breakdown is very telling. Filipinas tend to be better educated about sexual and reproductive matters than their largely Muslim Indonesian counterparts. PathFinders CEO Kay McArdle—a former labour barrister who joined the organization in 2013, after almost sixteen years in high-profile legal firms in Hong Kong—believes that the large number of Indonesians served by her organization reflects their more recent migration history. They have fewer support systems and tend to be less educated than their Filipina counterparts. Despite the different religions, Kay says both groups have something in common: the concept of shame, which is not always defined by faith. “It’s a common thread that repeats itself,” she tells me in one of several conversations I had with her. “It has more to do with the patriarchal nature of their societies. They know they’ve done something wrong but don’t articulate it in religious terms.”
Less than a quarter of the mothers helped by PathFinders choose to go home, taking their children with them. In 2014, about 41 percent were in the process of getting their Hong Kong immigration status, while the remaining 36 percent already had a valid visa. Put together, the women’s stories represent the clearest articulation of the workers-versus-people dichotomy in the global migration movement. With its focus on mothers and children, PathFinders stands out in the crowded field of NGOs trying to provide support for the domestic worker community. I wanted to find out more about how the largely volunteer, multinational staff works to ensure the safety and survival of the most vulnerable subgroup of workers in Hong Kong. It was both an eye-opener and a heartbreaker to follow this NGO closely over the course of a few weeks in the spring of 2015.
FRIDA IS A LUCKY baby. All of one month and eighteen days, she is about to get something that children born in Hong Kong to domestic workers long for: a birth certificate. It may take a few more weeks to secure, but it will give her access to all the health, educational and social services the government provides. When Frida gets sick, as all children do, her mother, Aesha, can take her to see a pediatrician without worrying about the cost of the consultation or the prescription. (I’ve changed the name of mother and child, at the request of PathFinders.)
You’ll forgive Aesha for putting the price of a doctor’s visit on top of her long list of things to worry about; she owes the Hong Kong public health system about HK$100,000 (US$13,000) for the delivery and postnatal services. For an Indonesian domestic worker who at best earns the equivalent of US$530 a month, that bill is about as large as the debt Spain owes the eurozone. Now that she’s unemployed and nursing—a maternity leave without benefits or the prospect of a job to return to—the debt comes closer to that of Greece. But thirty-six-year-old Aesha does have a supportive Chinese husband, which puts her in a much better position than the many domestic workers who become pregnant or give birth out of wedlock. Although the two were already legally married when Frida was born, Aesha’s residence status was (and remains) in limbo because she had left her job when her delivery date approached. The Hong Kong government rejected the husband’s application to have Aesha declared his dependent because he didn’t earn enough from his new job at a marine-themed tourist attraction. The verdict revoked Aesha’s right of abode in Hong Kong, denying her access to the public health care system, ailing and inadequate as it is.
For now, both mother and child rely on the support and home visits of a PathFinders social worker and a volunteer nurse, Christine and Cindy, respectively. Christine, a native speaker of Indonesia’s Bahasa language, translates everything Aesha says for me and Cindy, an American who relocated to Hong Kong a year earlier when her husband accepted a job in the aviation sector. In just over a year of volunteering for PathFinders, Cindy has seen first-hand how the medical establishment discriminates against migrant mothers. “They are not afforded much respect,” she told me before we met for this visit. I recalled an earlier conversation with Kay, who hinted at a certain resentment among women in Hong Kong—where fertility rates have declined for the past thirty years or so—toward domestic workers who seem too fecund, bringing more and more dark-skinned babies into their homeland.
Christine, Cindy and I are sitting in Aesha’s room in one of those small Hong Kong apartments (this one is about four hundred square feet at best) that has been sliced into even smaller units or converted into shelters for migrant workers, refugee claimants and the city’s most vulnerable. After a brief examination, Cindy expresses some minor concerns about Frida’s neck, which tilts back involuntarily instead of staying flat. If this continues to be the case at next month’s home visit, Cindy will take Frida to a doctor who has agreed to see PathFinders clients free of charge. (Cindy had just secured a pro bono arrangement with a family doctor to see up to five women or children a week.) Meanwhile, Christine talks to Aesha about the next steps in her legal battle with the government. If she can get her residency papers in order, then PathFinders will go to court on her behalf to ask for a retroactive waiving of her hospital bill. The fact that Aesha was married to a Hong Kong man at the time of birth makes her case reasonably strong.
While Cindy and Christine carry on with health and legal updates, I try to figure out something about Aesha’s friend, who has sat through the home visit. How odd it seems to have a man in what is in essence temporary lodging for female domestic workers. At first I’d assumed he was the husband. But when I asked, his response came with a grin and a hint of frustration. “Husband? No, I’m not.” Silence. Awkwardness. It takes me while to realize that the friend is another Indonesian woman from the small but fast-growing subculture of domestic tomboys—women who have adopted the butch lesbian look and have cast themselves as friends, protectors and sometimes sexual partners of other workers. Like everything in the culture of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, the tomboy tradition started within the Filipino community. Its Indonesian variation is a more recent phenomenon, and this tomboy, who asked not to be identified, fit the classic profile.
She (and I got the sense that “she” was her preferred pronoun) regards herself as the “landlady” of this three-bedroom apartment, which is home to ten other women, all of whom are in one form of trouble or another with Hong Kong immigration. Six sleep in one room—two per bunk bed and two on a floor mattress. Four share the other room, all on floor mattresses. No one was home when we arrived at four thirty in the afternoon, but two have finished working illegally in restaurants or cleaning services and are resting by the time Cindy and I leave shortly after six. (Christine stays behind to help Aesha with some paperwork.)
Aesha’s room comes with its own private bathroom and an adjacent kitchenette that consists of a two-burner gas cooker. As Aesha and her friend note, this makes it the premium suite in the apartment. Its one window opens onto a smelly indoor courtyard, so it’s kept shut at all times. Baby Frida doesn’t get her own crib, as there is simply no room for one. She shares the bed with her parents—a practice Cindy doesn’t recommend but accepts, since it’s the cultural norm among the Indonesian community.
What I remember most clearly about this visit, even many months later, is Aesha’s face. Despite all her problems, she maintained a big smile for her guests and kept looking so adoringly and proudly at her baby daughter. Though she’s lived in Hong Kong since 1998, Aesha believes her current situation to be the first time she has felt loved, needed and looked after by so many people. If and when her residency papers are sorted and her hospital bill waived, she’ll fulfill a lifelong dream: opening a small business to sell traditional Indonesian remedies to compatriots and local customers. Her husband can keep or quit his theme-park job, and all three will move out of the boarding house and into an apartment of their own (or at least with the in-laws). Lots of ifs and dreams here, but despite all that, Christine believes that Aesha’s is one of the happier of the six hundred active or dormant-for-now cases in the PathFinders files. After talking to the organization’s team of case managers and volunteers, I tend to agree.
In fact, Aesha has it easy. She doesn’t have to give up her child for closed adoption, the standard in Hong Kong. In that arrangement, mothers exit the picture completely, never knowing where their sons or daughters are placed. On the morning I talk to Kristina, a PathFinders case manager, she tells me about an Indonesian woman who has until 1:15 that afternoon to sign papers that will take her son away from her for good. “She can change her mind up until 1:14 p.m.,” Kristina tells me as she prepares to leave the office and accompany the mother to the adoption agency where the exchange will take place. Sign here. Take baby away there. At least until the child turns eighteen and actively seeks his biological mother. Unlike mothers who struggle with this decision and often change their minds, this one, I’m told, has been consistently clear about her child. She believes others can give him a better life than anything she can offer him now or in the future.
And at least baby Frida was born in a hospital. Stephanie, a Swiss national working for PathFinders, tells me the story of another Indonesian domestic worker who kept her pregnancy secret from her employers for almost nine months because “she didn’t want to bother them.” She had hoped to fly back to Indonesia and give birth there, but the baby decided to enter the world one day before her mother’s flight home. When the contractions began, the mother retreated to her room, where she had sterilized scissors to cut off the umbilical cord and covered the bed with plastic to avoid staining the sheets with blood. The woman, who had worked as an assistant midwife in her village in Indonesia, then gave birth to her first child as quietly as was humanly possible. The only noise her employers may have heard was the sound of their two dogs barking outside the new mother’s room. Perhaps the pets sensed that something or someone had entered the house.
The next day, the mother took the subway to the airport with the day-old daughter tucked in a sling and hidden behind a loose wool sweater. For some reason, she made it all the way to the departure gate without getting caught at airport security. She was found out only when the baby began to move and cry just as she and other passengers were about to board the flight. A member of the ground crew called the police, who arrested the mother on suspicion of child smuggling. Once DNA tests confirmed her maternity and the charges were dropped, the woman returned to her old job, her new child in tow. The employers, who had thought the worker was just gaining weight, turned out to be understanding and accommodating. A happy ending of sorts.
The workers and volunteers at PathFinders deal with such extreme cases on a daily basis. The NGO, which opened its doors in 2007, tries to provide medical, legal and social support for pregnant women, mothers and their children. When an employment contract is terminated or has expired, a domestic worker is given two weeks to find a new job or leave Hong Kong. While many non-pregnant women manage to switch employers within that short window, those with children (or visibly pregnant) find it harder to get work. Some overstay their visas and join a network of underground, off-the-books workers. The move traps them further in a cycle of abuse and financial despair. The labour system in Hong Kong is designed to run them out of town when they stop being workers and start living as women. Like other NGOs, PathFinders tries to assist its clients in practical ways while also advocating on their behalf with Hong Kong’s legal and political leaders.
Kay, the organization’s CEO, has a handy metaphor: the women and children helped by PathFinders are the bus, she tells me as she holds her iPhone in midair. But you can’t expect the bus to stay safe or reach its destination if the road it travels on is full of potholes and roadblocks. Kay believes advocacy work (clearing the road) helps her better serve the needs of the mothers. The Hong Kong inland revenue department doesn’t quite see it this way, however, and has been targeting PathFinders, along with a number of other NGOs, with audits or threats to withdraw its charitable status, making fundraising extremely difficult. This is all part of a larger crackdown on socially progressive organizations that the Protest Central movement has highlighted to the outside world. While the road has many bumps, one in particular enrages Kay, a mother of three boys: employers who terminate their workers’ contracts and get away with it. “I wasn’t fired when I got pregnant. Nor should these women [be].”
I’ve joined Kay, Yasmin and Jenny (the office manager and a volunteer law expert, respectively) in a morning “legal clinic.” Once every two weeks, Jenny and several pro bono lawyers update Kay on the progress made (or hurdles faced) in various active PathFinders cases. The more complicated ones involve asking the state to become the legal guardian of children whose mothers have abandoned or neglected them. The general rule at PathFinders is to do what’s in the best interests of the child, even if that sometimes conflicts with the mother’s interests.
About forty-five minutes into the clinic, two women storm into the office, asking for a place to stay until 3 p.m., when they can relocate to a new shelter. One of them looks high and is acting erratically. Bruises on her face and a black eye suggest that she was either hit or involved in a fight with another domestic worker or a partner. A case manager for one of the women tells them where they can go until the new shelter admits them. Kay uses the incident as a teaching moment for Yasmin, on day four of the job. One of her tasks will be to ask women to wait before they can be connected with their case manager.
But to wait where? There’s no reception area. Our meeting takes place in the front of the office, where staff members manoeuvre their way among boxes of donated baby clothes and toys, old newspapers from the Filipino and Indonesian communities in Hong Kong, and bundles of PathFinders fliers and booklets, including several on birth control methods. This makeshift reception area will get even more crowded later in the afternoon, when eight or nine mothers and their children are expected to drop by for one of the regular training workshops hosted by Carmin, the education program manager, on alternate Mondays and Thursdays.
In fact, Kay wraps up the legal clinic earlier than normal to allow the staff to prepare for today’s workshop on the theme of positive and effective discipline. Carmin has given me permission to attend and to talk to the women present. An American social worker based in Hong Kong begins by asking each woman to list where, why and how she last disciplined her child. The women respond with standard answers. The wheres: the playground, home, the supermarket. The whys: hitting other kids or refusing to share toys with a sibling. The hows: a little smack on the back, a threat to take away the toys or a shout for the child to stop. Some may wish to add the PathFinders front room to the list of wheres. Despite the instructor’s and the students’ best attempts to stay focused, a small room crammed with ten children aged two months to five years is the ultimate test of effective discipline (or even anger management, the topic of a previous workshop).
Other staffers continue working within earshot of the screaming and crying children, seemingly unfazed by it all. For most of the children, this is their major outing of the week. Many of the women gathered here survive on social security, which consists of grocery delivery and an allowance of HK$50 (US$6) a week for incidentals, including transportation. Candy and toys for the children are luxuries. When I ask one of the mothers if her crying boy would like some chocolate, she looks at me as if I have just asked the dumbest question she has ever heard in her life. Of course he loves chocolate, but it’s a rare occasion when he gets to eat a whole bar. She’ll give him one half today and the other half tomorrow.
But the material disadvantages pale in comparison to the social isolation and stigma these women face from their own community. As Carmin tells me, Indonesians in Hong Kong and at home use the term “sin child” to describe anyone born out of wedlock. Some extended families in Asia’s largest Muslim country refuse to look after sin children for religious reasons. The real reason, however, may well be that these boys and girls often have African or dark-skinned Indian or Pakistani fathers. You can see the variations in skin colour in the room: six of the ten children look more African than Indonesian. One has dark brown skin, inherited from his Indian father. Another is very light-skinned, suggesting a Syrian or Afghan father, and two look Chinese. Carmin says the darker the skin of the baby, the more ostracized the mother will become.
The ethnic mix doesn’t come as a surprise to case managers, who know that their clients usually fall prey to and find comfort in a parallel community of male black and brown migrants and asylum seekers. They meet in the infamous Chungking Mansions in Kowloon, an international hostel and mini-mall, the nerve centre of African and Asian migrant life in Hong Kong. On Sundays, the men descend on Central to chat up women. Thousands of single women—or married ones with husbands they haven’t seen in years—in one place and in a good, social mood. The only time I was ever hustled in Hong Kong was on a Sunday when two Pakistani men followed me as I tried to talk to the women. The men wanted to know if I would be interested in meeting some Filipino women for “private time.”
It’s no wonder that many domestic workers turn to religion for shelter from the cruelty of their employers and the opportunism of other brown and black migrants. St. John’s Cathedral, with its large and largely Filipino congregation, is the more mainstream outlet for this religious need, but smaller prayer groups provide a more intimate space for faith and friendship. There’s a battle for the bodies and souls of Filipina workers in Hong Kong.
ROSE, A DOMESTIC WORKER in her early forties, stands up in front of thirty of her peers and, in the parlance of the weekly spiritual gathering that is the Feast Hong Kong, takes part in the sharing moment. Brother Cruz has called on her to share her story with newcomers—and there are four, myself included, in the library room of the Bayanihan Centre this Sunday—and update regulars. For a year now, this Christian prayer group has been meeting at the centre on Sundays for a few hours of exchanging stories and affirmations. Last year, Rose was diagnosed with breast cancer—an illness she attributes in part to all the negativity in her past life as a domestic worker. Her doctors had given up on her and told her to prepare a will. But, Rose insists, her faith healed her. “Every morning when I wake up and start breathing, it’s a blessing. I’m alive today,” she tells the room, earning a round of applause and numerous amens. A fellow member of the group later tells me that Rose was “prayed over” by the sisters in the Feast, who in effect cured her.
A reluctant Amelia takes to the stand next, clutching the wireless microphone as if her life depends on it—and it may well be the case. Where Rose’s story took on an inspirational, healing-by-faith feel (in line with the Feast’s mantra of See Big, Feel Big, Speak Big), Amelia’s elicits a sombre, tear-filled response. At first I can’t follow her. She keeps complaining about a sister-in-law in Hong Kong who constantly puts her down. She says she was hospitalized and “almost died” three times. She doesn’t go into causes, but I, like others in the room, immediately think a nervous breakdown at best and failed suicide attempts at worst. “Lord, what’s your purpose in my life?” Amelia asks. “I want to sleep forever. Why do you want me to live?” Rhetorical questions all, since she has already figured out the answer: “He wants me to serve for him.”
Amelia told me in a one-on-one chat after her sharing that she had lost most of her money to a philandering husband back in the Philippines who had taken on a new girlfriend and neglected their three daughters. The sister-in-law, a former domestic worker in Hong Kong who married a Chinese man and quit the business, called all the shots in Amelia’s life, controlling even her relationship with her husband and children. Though Amelia and the husband had separated, he still looked after the children, and all four relied on Amelia’s remittances to survive. The eldest daughter, seventeen, planned to go to university next year in Manila, and her tuition and living expenses were keeping Amelia working in Hong Kong, fighting for her physical and mental health.
Stories like Rose’s and Amelia’s don’t make headlines in Chinese or Filipino newspapers. They don’t have the requisite ingredients for an exposé on the abuse of workers by local employers or their exploitation by recruitment agencies. Neither complained about her current boss—Amelia described her Chinese employers as kind and gentle people—but both had experienced the physical and emotional setbacks that are common to women who leave their homes in search of a better life for their families (and to a lesser extent, themselves). Cancer recognizes no international borders. Neither does depression. There’s no mechanism through which Amelia can seek therapy or even counselling. Most of the NGOs helping domestic workers in Hong Kong take on legal battles—contract violation, visa extensions, deportations, criminal charges—leaving the emotional and psychological needs to be addressed on an ad hoc basis, if at all.
This gap in the system explains why the Feast Hong Kong draws such a large number of Filipina workers to its weekly prayer meetings and sharing moments. At the heart of this Catholic fellowship and worship meeting group (founded by Filipino author, preacher and entrepreneur Bo Sanchez) is a one-to-one spiritual mentorship that allows each member to “make disciples of Jesus by loving one person at a time.” The group’s message follows an equally simple pattern: Love Someone Today, or LST.
To my secular mind, it’s hard not to see something cult-like about the male-dominated group’s targeting of domestic workers. Yit Barreda, a coordinator who invited me to the prayer meeting, insists that the Feast Hong Kong is open to everyone. Perhaps anticipating any suggestion of female exploitation, Yit reminds the group that all discipleship pairs must be of the same gender. Men in need of a disciple can only be connected to pairs of other women, thereby eliminating any one-on-one sexual tension.
For the rest of this Sunday afternoon, I decide to put my doubts aside and take part in the prayer meeting. I’m encouraged by the positive messages Brother Cruz is showing in his PowerPoint presentation. Our God is a happy God and not a close-minded one, he tells his rapt audience at the beginning of the talk. (No one here calls it a sermon. Think more along the lines of those airport hotel self-improvement seminars that you see advertised in the back pages of free commuter papers.) The takeaway messages appear on screen in quick succession: “Dare to dream. It’s free to dream.” “If you want to be happy, don’t follow your feelings. Let your feelings follow you.” “You gotta faith it till you make it.”
But one message stands out for me and also, I suspect, for many of the women in the room: “Tell a different story.” Brother Cruz encourages the women to change their narrative of exploitation into one of empowerment through faith and community. Nobody denies or suppresses stories of eighteen-hour days, racial discrimination or verbal abuse, but the goal is to provide the women with one afternoon a week when they can rejoice in their faith and gain strength from one another. But as I find out when I speak to some of the women after the meeting, changing the narrative will require a lot more than a collective prayer. Singing along to R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” or Diana Ross’s “If We Hold On Together” might bring temporary comfort, but what these women really need is a long-term resolution to their modern-day slavery.
Of the many women who shared their stories, Flor and Vilma left the biggest impact on me. They live their lives with a dignity that belies the constant emotional hurdles they face on and off the job. I promised to include their stories in this book because, I told them, their bravery and resilience need to be known outside Hong Kong and the Philippines.
IN 2012, FLOR’S nine-year-old daughter, the only girl in a family of five children, asked her mother for four hundred pesos (just under US$10) to pay for a school trip. To Flor, four hundred pesos was a lot of money. It was the cost of one large sack of rice for her business, a food stall in a working-class neighbourhood of Quiapo, part of the Metro Manila area. Not wanting to choose between pleasing her daughter and spending on the business, Flor made a third decision: “That was the time I told myself I need to get out.” She decided to seek work as a domestic in Hong Kong. Although she entered the city on a tourist visa without any firm prospects, Flor lucked out and landed a job within a few weeks with a German family with three children. Her own five children she left with their father and her partner. (Flor, thirty-eight, is not married but has lived with her partner for more than fifteen years.) She describes him as a good man who has taken over the food stall, contributing to the household budget. Like many of her peers in Hong Kong, Flor is now the real breadwinner in her family.
For the self-described Tiger Mom, raising a family in absentia involves regular lessons in gender politics. She trained the four boys, who range in age from fourteen to seven, to do household chores, including cooking and cleaning. “I was afraid my daughter would end up as the boys’ maid.” The stocky, short-haired Flor, who struck me as butch but not enough to be a tomboy, has a soft spot for her one girl, with whom she Skypes daily on her mobile phone. Those video calls, however, do not replace the intimacy of family time or lessen the loneliness of the domestic worker. When it gets dark, Flor retires to her room, and the longing begins. “During the morning, you don’t feel the loneliness. You’re busy with the chores. But at night. . .” she trails off, but I get what she means.
Although she’s been in Hong Kong for only three years, Flor has flown home every Christmas to be with her children. But living so far apart means missing out on all the other milestone moments in her children’s lives. “Birthdays are big days for me. I always call and ask what they want for a present.” As they get older, the children ask for gadgets that cost more than the clothes or shoes they once craved. It means saving even more of her disposable income and denying herself any small pleasure.
I ask how she feels about struggling to meet her children’s needs while her employers’ kids get anything they want and much more. “We don’t have their toys and we can’t afford to eat out like they do, but I’m paid to look after them and that’s what I do,” Flor responds, preferring not to compare her life with her boss’s. Truth be told, the two women share the mothering of one set of kids. (Flor refers to her own as “children” and her boss’s as “kids.”) When the youngest of the German kids returned to Hong Kong after a Christmas break, she surprised everyone by running into Flor’s arms and calling her “Mama.” Flor insists that she has never sensed any resentment from her boss, who has given her permission to “discipline the kids as if they are mine.” In fact, the employer is entrusting the life of her youngest child, born with severe thyroid problems, to Flor, who has to administer her daily thyroid supplements. Household harmony in this Hong Kong apartment hinges on Flor getting out of the picture when her bosses return from work. As she retreats to her room, around 8 p.m., the kids become someone else’s children and responsibility.
On Sundays, Flor gets a whole day to be not a worker but a woman who hangs out with a group of friends and prays at the Feast. Ever since a friend first invited her to one of the meetings two years ago, Flor has been attending regularly. “They sustain me,” she explains. “I feel lifted when I’m here.” Flor says the group is nurturing her “longing for hope.” One of these hopes is to go home and open a small computer shop, but that won’t happen for a few more years. She needs to save more money. She’d also like to add to her skill set in order to increase her earning potential—perhaps study cooking or learn to drive and seek a more semi-skilled position, away from the world of domestic work. Until then, she has to deal with being separated from her children and living in a society that can be quite judgmental about Filipinas in general. “They look down at us. When you bump into a Chinese woman in the street by accident, she looks at you as if you threw acid on her.” But perhaps nothing better illustrates the double standard in Hong Kong society than attitudes that equate the clothes or makeup that some Filipinas wear with a sexual invitation. “Hong Kong women wear short shorts and sleeveless dresses, but [Hong Kong men] don’t judge them. Filipinas dress up and put on makeup one day a week. Why can’t you let us have it?”
If Flor ever fulfills her dream of opening a computer shop in Manila, she should consider hiring Vilma, a college graduate in computer programming who started work as a domestic in 1995, not long after finishing her studies. Her first stint, looking after the elderly grandparents in an extended family, lasted five long and unhappy years. She was twenty and “didn’t know much about life.” While her employer, a brown Indian family with deep roots in Hong Kong, treated her with respect, her aunt, a domestic worker for a different branch of the same family, interfered in every aspect of Vilma’s life. She criticized her decisions and called her names for dressing up or talking to other workers. “It was painful. I kept praying that one day my aunt will change.” When her prayers weren’t answered, Vilma packed her bags and returned to Manila in 2000.
The trip home was a gamble for twenty-six-year-old Vilma. Even if she found a job, she would earn half of her Hong Kong salary. As it happened (probably one of her prayers was finally answered), she landed a job in a Korean restaurant in a part of the city popular with tourists. Within a few months, she had taken over as floor manager and was trusted to close the restaurant at night and deposit any cash in the bank the next morning. Still, her salary and tips barely covered household expenses. Despite being the youngest of seven children, Vilma was the main breadwinner in her family.
The family’s financial situation deteriorated in 2005, when the owner closed the restaurant and returned to Korea to retire. Unemployed again, Vilma tried to find work in retail or catering, but nothing came up. Her romantic prospects improved when she met a “lovely” factory worker and had two daughters with him in 2006 and 2007. To be single and struggling to feed and clothe older siblings is one thing, but to be the mother of two babies who rely on you for everything is something else entirely. Vilma knew the time had come to change course again. She decided to swallow her pride and return to the life of a domestic worker in order to give her daughters, Chynnie and Hannah, a better life. “I tried. I couldn’t find a job [in Manila]. I want to raise them well. They are my life. My love is for them. My heart is for them. But how can you help your children when they are hungry?”
In 2008, before Chynnie’s second birthday, Vilma returned to Hong Kong to work for the son of her first employer, the Indian family. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long, as her boss relocated to the United Kingdom, leaving Vilma to take up her first job with a Chinese family. “It was different,” she says with a mischievous smile, her first during our hour-long chat. The grandmother in the multi-generational household where she’s still working can be very demanding. She often accuses Vilma of being “stupid” or “lazy,” and humiliates her in front of other members of the household because her skin is darker than theirs. Yet Vilma is surprisingly understanding, blaming the grandmother’s actions on old age. “It’s a power thing. I can tolerate anything.”
Vilma’s day starts at six thirty in the morning and ends, at the earliest, around eight in the evening. She looks after three children, two boys and a girl. The eldest boy is nine and has taken to punching her in the arms, mostly in jest but at times in anger. While the parents seem supportive of her, they don’t spend enough time at home to notice their son’s actions or detect his abusive tone of voice when he orders Vilma to bring him water or a snack.
Like Flor, Vilma only has time to herself when she retires to her room for a few hours before falling asleep. This is when she checks in on her daughters, now nine and eight years old. Like the proud mama she is, Vilma describes Chynnie as a very talented, smart kid who is always at the top of her class. She has sent her daughters to a relatively expensive private school to ensure that they get a good start in life. The school fees for both girls come to about two months’ salary. When you factor in regular remittances and personal expenses, Vilma has only enough left to pay for her transportation on Sundays to and from the Bayanihan Centre, where most activities are free or heavily subsided. (She volunteers to help with many activities in order to get in for free.) Vilma makes this sacrifice gladly because she is adamant that family history will not repeat itself: “I don’t want [my children] to follow in my footsteps. I don’t want them to become domestic workers.” If that means being unable to kiss them, to hug them or to celebrate their birthdays, she says, so be it. It’s for their ultimate greater good.
Until she can be reunited with her daughters—in a “few more years”—Vilma, like Flor and the other mothers in the room, will have to rely on Skype and the community that the Feast Hong Kong has provided for them. “It’s what keeps me going. God has a plan for me. I will follow that plan.”