LIVING TO SERVE

One in five homes in Singapore employs foreign domestic workers. Recently, I learned about the many different kinds of female workers who have toiled in this region over the decades.

On a Sunday at Scape Youth Park in the heart of Singapore, we found groups of domestic workers relaxing on the lawn.

One Sunday in January, a group of young women handed me a cell phone and requested me to take a picture of them as they sat under the shade of a tree at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. They had each brought food and drink to share and they had laid all the food out on a sheet in a clearing under the tree. I began to spot such gatherings of women every Sunday in parks across town. At Marina Barrage on a Sunday that resounded with thundershowers, they huddled in groups under the long walkways. On a bleary day at Jurong Lake Gardens, I found them taking cover under an awning by a shuttle stop, waiting for the drizzle to end. They seemed happy whenever I chanced upon them. I found a bunch of them giggling at the grounds of Scape Youth Park, taking selfies right by a stationary red double-decker bus planted on the lawn. I learned that they were all foreign domestic workers employed in residences across Singapore and that Sunday was their only day off in a long work week.

Many of the people I’ve met during my six-month stay employ these full-time live-in helpers—domestic help must be female, according to Singaporean rules—whose jobs span the entire gamut of housekeeping and, in many cases, childcare, too. As of the end of December 2020, one in five homes in this country employed household help. There are, approximately, 250,000 foreign domestic workers in this country, their circumstances, no doubt, complicated further by the pandemic, especially now that parents and children work from home for long stretches. I’ve been reading about new measures in Singapore meant to counter the effects of this challenging period; as of April 2021, sudden house calls by social workers from the Ministry of Manpower are not uncommon.

Since my arrival here, I’ve also read stories of the occasional ill-treatment of such foreign domestic workers in The Straits Times. In a recent case, a helper lost her life: Gaiyathiri Murugayan admitted to starving and torturing a Myanmar maid Piang Ngaih Don, 24, in July 2016. Stories like this are heartbreaking when we consider that the victims are often voiceless employees who eke out a life in another nation because of straightened circumstances back in their home countries.

My own experiences with helpers in all the homes I’ve visited have been positive. On every encounter with such a worker at the homes of our Singaporean friends—and I made a passing reference to one such helper in my post about the Sikh community—they’ve seemed to be one of the family. These foreign domestic workers are from many parts of Southeast Asia, with a majority of them hailing from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Thailand. Naturally, in a rule-bound place like Singapore, there are also many requirements around engaging help at home.

When I poked around the Ministry of Manpower website, I was hardly surprised at the rules and regulations for hired help. Employers must buy a $5,000 security bond for each helper employed (unless she is a Malaysian). The employer must also take the responsibility for the worker’s health and medical insurance. There are also stipulations on monitoring her health.  Not only must she undergo a medical examination by a local doctor within two weeks of her arrival in Singapore. If she is under 50 years of age, she will also be screened every six months—for pregnancy and infectious diseases such as syphilis, HIV and tuberculosis.

MOM’s injunctions and watchfulness seem to give workers some reassurance, that they do have recourse should something should go wrong, according to Suryanti, a worker from Indonesia whose story is featured in HARD AT WORK: LIFE IN SINGAPORE, a book that grew from a project at National University of Singapore. This collection of interviews shows readers the other side of Singapore. Buttressing the success stories of high-flying professionals are the tales of very ordinary people who man the eco-system. There are many eye-opening stories in this book, all revelatory of how the story of a successful nation rarely incorporates stories of everyday people who struggle to make ends meet.

Suryanti’s story made me cringe sometimes. Yet, her sense of humor despite her pain, her disappointment in her husband back in Indonesia, and her detachment with her own children, hold lessons for all of us. At the end of eight years as a domestic worker, Suryanti trusts the Singaporean government. “I told my family I want to work in Singapore because I want to find more money to provide for the kids’ education. So I want to work here as long as my body is strong enough and I can still take it.” Suryanti’s story is just one of many stories of thousands of helpers who work in Singapore simply to be able to offer a comfortable life for their families back home. The lives of these foreign domestic workers at least have the guarantee of a host government trying to ensure their comfort and safety. I contrast this with the insensitivity of the British empire in the treatment of traveling ayahs (nannies) from India in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

While reading a paper by historian Arunima Datta of Idaho State University—Responses to traveling Indian ayahs in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain—I came to understand the pattern of oppression of women in menial service in colonial times. These ayahs were engaged by an English family at an Indian port before embarking on a long sea voyage back home to England; for a few years, a deposit of one hundred pounds by the family ensured the return passage of these ayahs. In the latter half of the 19th century, however, owing to disagreements  between the British government and the India Office (established after the British government took control of the East India Company's possessions in India in 1858), the deposit system was discontinued. Soon after that decision, British society began to witness the repercussions: Destitute ayahs were left to beg on the streets because they hadn’t been guaranteed passage back by ship to India either by their employer or by the imperial government. In 1869, having witnessed the rising number of penurious Indian servants in different localities of Britain—there were some 900 cases in London alone during 1868—a professor in Cambridge wrote to the India Office suggesting that deposit system be reintroduced. It never was, thanks to the disingenuous politicking in the upper reaches of British society.

One ayah, however, took matters into her own hands, according to Arunima Datta, whose meticulous research on the stories of these powerless women makes for a riveting read. The ayah found a wily, surefire way to engage the attention of the authorities and actually managed to be paid her passage back to India. In a move that reminded me of Greta Thunberg’s tactic in the matter of climate change, this ayah began to beg routinely, in the fall of 1852, in front of the London headquarters of the East India Company (EIC), then the headquarters of British India, with a placard which read:

“Poor Ayah. No rice e no milk e poor baby in Calcutta e no husband here to love poor Ayah, he want me, I want him, he cant get her e brought here by bad bad woman- wont send me to Calcutta. Pity Pity.”

The ayah’s pluckiness helped her survive and it reminded me of something my father-in-law told me years ago. He observed that the life of an old widower in India was often difficult. A widow, on the other hand, tended to make herself useful to her extended family by helping in the kitchen or around the house. While this observation held a whiff of patriarchy, the larger point my father-in-law was making held true: Women, especially those who have been kicked around by society, are survivors. Perhaps it was this very awareness of their lack of privilege that often empowered hardworking women and drove them to seek opportunities beyond the shores of their home. And arrive in Singapore, they did.

In early 20th century Singapore, for instance, women landed by boat from China seeking all manner of employment. I wrote an earlier post in which I talked about the “majie” (it’s really, “amah-chieh”, which means “elder sister”, in Cantonese), celibate Cantonese women who were domestic help in the homes of the wealthy. They dressed in traditional black trousers and a white tunic and their attire was part and parcel of their persona. The black and white amah was also a fixture in the homes of all English memsahibs (“mems”) in old Singapore; they feature in almost every photograph or movie from those times.

From the 1920s onward, there were the other spinsters who arrived into Singapore’s shores to sweat it out in construction. The legendary Samsui women transported rocks, dug trenches and carried out all sorts of physical work that belied their diminutive stature. They were identified by their signature red head dress, a square piece of red cloth that was propped up like a rectangular roof on their heads, and by the buckets that hung from shoulder poles in which they carried building debris.

In this mural by Yip Yew Chong, we see some of the women who were seminal to building early Singapore—among others, the Samsui women and the boatloads of amahs who served in homes.

Yet another group of women began trickling in by boat in the 19th century, women from the Tamil community in South India marked for hard labor by the colonial plantation society of British Malaya. According to Arunima Datta, author of the recently published Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya, these women—cheaper for hire than their male counterparts—were convenient as producers and, most importantly, “reproducers” of labor. In fact, once female coolies began settling in Malaya, child labor became a common sight on rubber plantations. Children often helped their parents by collecting rubber from latex-collection cups and cleaning them. Colonial law forbade children under 16 to be recruited; the author describes how plantation owners winked at the law. These children were learning quickly by doing, without incurring any extra training cost for their bosses. Despite being exploited and oppressed by colonial planters and their own families, women coolies showed pluck by navigating life in mean circumstances inside rubber plantations. A group of them ultimately even enlisted in the Rani of Jhansi regiment that sided with the Indian National Army under the leadership of Subash Chandra Bose to oust the British imperialists.

The story of diligent enterprising women in Southeast Asia is the story of women who endured personal hardship and perilous journeys in order to help their families back in their home countries. In many instances, they were escaping poverty, hunger or danger as they sought a better life. The foreign domestic workers of Singapore are simply the latest avatar of all the women who passed before them. My heart goes out to such women who have learned to smile and serve even though their life is skewed by family circumstances or, as we see in Myanmar today, political turmoil.

I recalled our family’s brief experience with Russell, a helper who was introduced to us while we lived in Paris for a year in 1998. She was from the Philippines and she had left her young toddler behind in the care of her husband and her parents. She sent home money to her family monthly and she could do so only because she worked in several homes in Paris. She cleaned our home and also cared for our eight-year-old daughter and our four-year-old son on the days I was busy. Our paths had crossed only briefly during that year but in that short time, we had been impressed by her integrity, her attention to detail, her earnestness and her positive outlook about her lot in life.

More than two decades later, while beginning to write this story, I found myself reminded of Russell and her child, and quite disappointed with myself for not keeping in touch with the woman who had once set aside all her love for her child in order to shower some love on mine.