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Christine B.N. Chin
1998
3. “Boys, Amahs, and Girls”: Domestic Workers of the Past and Present
| Classification itself is the object of a discourse . . . [T]here is always a stake in where things are: tell me how you classify and I’ll tell you who you are. |
| —Roland Barthe, The Semiotic Challenge, 1998 |
It can be argued that Malaysian demands for Filipina and Indonesian servants are a consequence of successful economic growth in the country. By this reasoning, the continued in-migration of foreign female domestic workers is a testament to a development path that offers Malaysian servants alternative employment opportunities, as many more middle-class and upper-middle-class Malaysians feel the need, and possess the purchasing powers, to hire live-in domestic workers.
My argument, however, is that personnel changes in domestic service are more complex and revealing of the state’s “relations of ruling” than the above explanation suggests. 1 By refusing to intercede overtly in meeting demands for household help, the colonial and postcolonial state authorities in Malaysia exhibit relative similarities respectively in structuring and restructuring the larger fields of possible actions and responses in a society that constitutes particular peoples as domestic servants.
Hylam Boys and Klings
One of the earliest available historical references to paid domestic service tells us that Chinese and Indian migrant men worked as servants in European households during the mid to late 1800s. 2 Malay women, as well as Chinese and Indian migrant women, performed unpaid reproductive labor in their capacities as wives, mothers, and daughters. Malay and Chinese debt-bondswomen, in particular, also are known to have performed unpaid reproductive labor in households other than their own.
We have seen in the previous chapter how and why paternalistic colonial policies were conceived to “protect” the rural Malay lifestyle. Colonial protection included leaving relatively intact the Malay institution of debt-bondage wherein men and women who could not repay money borrowed from rulers or chiefs were then taken to live with and work for their creditors. 3
In debt-bondage, a creditor held the right to determine when and how the debt was to be repaid. Young debt-bondswomen were known to be taken to satisfy the sexual and household needs of Malay rulers and their male followers. Rulers offered the sexual services of debt-bondswomen as a way to elicit the loyalty of male conscripts without homes and families. 4 A debt-bondswoman was quoted as having said, “Our chief works are cooking, working, carrying water, splitting firewood, pounding rice, and at nights, we are to prostitute ourselves, giving half of this earning to the raja and half to supply ourselves with clothing and provision for the sultan, the house and other slaves.” 5 Many times, a debt-bondswoman could gain her freedom if she gave birth to her creditor-master’s child, and/or if her creditor-master selected her as his concubine.
From the way that the British constructed specific roles for Malay, Chinese, and Indian women’s participation, it is clear that the colonial state was gendered in its relation to women. Regardless of different ethnic backgrounds, women were constituted and treated primarily as domestic-sexual persons. If and when women assumed “productive” roles in economy, they did so under different conditions than men.
The presence of Chinese and Indian male servants during the mid to late nineteenth century raises an interesting question. If the performance of unpaid reproductive labor was associated intimately with women’s ascribed roles in the household, then why were men as opposed to women allowed to work as domestic servants?
The high ratio of male to female migrants produced a surplus male workforce that could and did meet European demands for household help without negatively affecting labor supply in key industries. At the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese or “Hylam boys” (Chinese men from the Hailam clan), and “Klings” (a pejorative term used in reference to South Indians) performed paid domestic labor in European households. A colonial writer of that period observed that “Chinese women do not go out to service, they are too proud to be menials.” 6 This romantic illusion of women’s alleged refusal to be domestic servants glossed over the fact that because of their low numbers, Chinese women were of necessity reserved for more profitable occupations such as prostitution, which helped to maintain a stable male migrant workforce and subsequently to assure a constant inflow of revenue to the state treasury. 7
Colonial notions of Western cultural and moral superiority delimited the choice of male servants according to race. The absence of references to Malay male servants in European households was due largely to racial and paternalistic attitudes toward Malay men. Within the context of colonial land, education, and labor legislation and policies designed to protect Malay peoples, it would have been morally indefensible to hire the future heirs of the country to work in the low-status job of the domestic servant. 8
Given a choice between Chinese or Indian male servants, Europeans were partial to the former—a preference that reflected and reinforced racial stereotypes: while Indians were perceived as docile workers, they also were considered less intelligent and less hygienic in their ways, as the following passage demonstrates:
Chinese are excellent servants. They are sober, industrious, methodical and attentive to their duties. They are limited to Macaos and Hylams . . . [“Natives of Madras or ‘Klings’ ”] invariably drink and are filthy in the extreme. The writer found a Kling cook once beating up a custard pudding with the stump of an old broom. Chinese servants will tell you that Kling cooks do all their work in the kitchen such as ornamenting or whitening cakes with their dirty fingers. A story is told of a Kling cook boiling the plum pudding in the corner of his waist cloth, who hearing his master call, rushed out of the kitchen forgetting the pudding which came flying out of the pot dangling about his heels. 9
Colonial construction of Chinese men as “boys” defused the threat of the presence of adult males from a different race who worked in close proximity to European women. 10 While Chinese male servants lived in separate quarters on the premises and performed all kinds of housework, there was no indication that they provided childcare services. 11 It was general practice among European employers to hire Chinese men based on surat or letters of recommendation from previous employers. Chinese secret societies conducted a lucrative business of forging letters to place male workers, some of whom knew little of housework. By the 1930s, Europeans were complaining bitterly about the frequent use of falsified letters, and Chinese male servants’ demands for higher wages and holidays. Employers expressed their outrage in a series of letters to the editor of the Straits Times:
I have been a victim on many occasions and have spent many a hard earned dollar on rogues who obviously have never had anything to do with running a house or cooking.If things stay on much longer as they are doing at present, why before we know where we are, we shall have our servants asking for annual holidays. They might go further. They might ask for an evening off a month. Horrors! Dogs must be licensed. Why not servants? And make them pay for their own license. If they ask for such high wages as $30.00 a month, muzzle ’em. 12
Employers also rejected Chinese servant demands for “coffee money.”
As a class, they should certainly be kept in their place and the government should be called upon to take every strong measure to stamp out the “coffee money” evil. A little dose of the cat or rotan should teach these people that we Europeans are intolerant of such evil practices. No European would descend so low as to ask for coffee money, and it is not expected that we should allow our servants to do so. 13
Coffee money, in the context of postcolonial Malaysia, is equivalent to “under the table money” given to state bureaucrats for rapid official approval of projects and/or business licenses. Fatimah Halim argues that in the colonial context, coffee money, or the Malay version of duit kopi, similarly meant “under-counter payments.” 14 It is unclear as to why Chinese male servants would ask their employers for such payments. Perhaps, coffee money embodied the servants’ demands for a food allowance in addition to their regular wages since it is not known if they were told to buy their own food, or if meals were provided by employers. Eventually, some Chinese female servants who worked for European employers were told to buy and cook their own food (see section on amahs in this chapter).
By the early 1930s, the demands made by Chinese male servants led to a call among the European employers for an official registry of domestic servants, presumably to filter out particular kinds of servants who were considered unfit for service. In 1933, the state publicly announced that it was not prepared to establish an official registry because of the lack of funds. 15 At the same time, Chinese women began arriving on the west coast of Malaya, and in Singapore, to work as amahs or domestic servants.
The Cantonese word amah is a variant of the romanized version for “mother”: “ah ma” is synonymous with “ma ma.” Strictly speaking, the word amah as opposed to “ah ma” is used in reference to a surrogate mother or a wet nurse. 16 In the 1930s, amahs were single celibate Chinese female migrants who performed paid reproductive labor ranging from childcare to washing clothes and cooking.
Amahs
The majority of migrant workers during the 1930s were Cantonese women from the Kwangtung region in Southern China. They belonged to a well-established anti-marriage movement: “Nearly all the girls there had a habit of swearing sisterhood to each other, taking vows of celibacy, and looking upon their prospective husbands as enemies. If, as a result of family pressure, they did marry, they would refuse to consummate the marriage, return home on the third day of the wedding and refuse to return to their husbands.” 17
In order to remain independent from men, young and older unmarried celibate women worked as silk farmers and spinners in Kwangtung’s silk industry. They would pool their resources to build Ku Por Uk or Old Maids’ Houses/Grandaunt’s Houses away from their familial homes. 18 Female residents of Ku Por Uk accepted collective responsibility for household tasks and finances. Patriarchal Chinese society sanctioned Cantonese women’s actions so long as the latter undertook a ritual called sor hei (to comb one’s hair into a bun at the back of the head) in a temple. The ceremony symbolized religious legitimation of women’s newfound rights and status.
The introduction of European technology in the Chinese silk industry during the 1930s, coupled with a series of natural disasters and political strife in Southern China, encouraged women’s out-migration. However, migration was not entirely due to economic factors per se. Even though most of the women had lost their jobs as silk farmers and spinners, their decisions to migrate were precipitated also by the desire to remain socially independent from men. In a 1994 interview with a newspaper reporter, a retired amah explained that:
There is no point in getting married. After all, people like us would not be marrying rich men. If we did get married, we would still have to work so hard, have to have babies and all. There is no point slaving for your husband, is there? You might as well do the same work and get paid for it. If you are on your own, whatever money you earn is yours. No one can tell you what to do. 19
Out-migration was a key avenue by which the women could retain their independence during a period of turbulent socioeconomic and political change. They migrated with the help of male labor brokers called sui hak (“water guest”). Upon arrival in Malaya, the women were placed in halfway houses until they found employment or they lived in rooms rented by their fellow village/kinfolk.
In the course of fieldwork, I interviewed three retired amahs of the 1930s (well into their eighties at the time of the interviews). The women’s names were Ah Foon Cheh, Ah Lan Cheh, and Ah Ling Cheh. 20 Their first names, Foon, Lan, and Ling, are substitutes for “ma” in the word “ah ma.” The suffix “cheh” means older sister or spinster. Ah Foon Cheh then is Foon, the spinster or older sister.
Prior to their departure from China, Ah Foon Cheh and Ah Lan Cheh worked in the silk industry and Ah Ling Cheh worked on her father’s farm land. They came to Malaya as free women, not indentured workers, since the first two women paid for their passage with their savings while Ah Ling Cheh had borrowed money from her relatives. The three amahs and their seven chi mui (“sisters”) rented a room in a shop house in Chinatown and eventually saved enough money to buy a small flat on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. The flat or fong chai (small room) was a place where the women went on their rest days or at retirement. Many times, the flat was used as a temporary shelter for unemployed women.
In Malaya, the women reconstituted their informal network of “sisters.” The network protected them from Chinese secret societies that controlled prostitutes and mui tsai (“girl slave”), and at the same time formed the basis for self-help in a foreign country. Employment was secured via informal amah networks or with the help of shopkeepers who doubled as informal domestic employment agents. Even though the three women worked for Chinese families, it is known that amahs also worked in European households. 21 Ah Foon Cheh, Ah Lan Cheh, and Ah Ling Cheh stated that neither they nor their friends had ever entertained the possibility of working for Malays because of religious differences. The relative absence of Chinese female servants in Malay households during that period was the result of low numbers of middle and upper-middle class Malay families, and to be sure, Muslim prohibition on the consumption of pork. Presently, there is only one reported case of a Chinese amah who worked as a cook in an elite Malay household, and she neither cooked nor consumed pork throughout her employment tenure. 22
Between the 1930s and 1950s, Chinese women began to displace Chinese male servants as large numbers of women found work for half the monthly wages of the men. Chinese female servants accepted anywhere between (Malayan dollars) $5 to $15 per month, while Chinese male servants demanded at least $30 per month. Women who worked for European employers were paid slightly more than those who worked for non-Europeans, namely Chinese employers. 23
In wealthy Chinese households, female servants performed a variety of tasks such as cooking, cleaning, ironing, and childcare. At the top of the servant hierarchy were cooks and “baby” amahs. Ah Foon Cheh and Ah Ling Cheh respectively worked as a baby nurse and a cook in wealthy Chinese households. Decades later, Ah Ling Cheh was asked to take care of her employers’ grandchildren. Ah Lan Cheh, on the other hand, worked as an “all-purpose servant” who cooked, cleaned, and took care of her employers’ children until she left to work as a cook in a wealthier Chinese household.
Servants did not have predetermined rest days, and had to ask in advance if they needed time off from work. Employers usually allowed servants one-half of a rest day for religious observances, such as the first and fifteenth day of the month according to the lunar calendar.
Chinese amahs were not known to leave their jobs because of disputes over wages or rest days. Ah Ling Cheh explained that most of her sisters negotiated terms of employment with potential employers either at the latter’s houses or the fong chai. She and her “sisters” privileged mutual respect and trust, over monthly wages. 24
In the 1960s, Ah Ling Cheh temporarily left her job because of her employer’s demeanor toward her:
Once I had an argument with the mistress. She accused me of breaking the antique vase. I told her that I didn’t do it but she accused me all the same. So, I packed my clothes and went back to the fong chai. It broke my heart to leave the children. They clung to my trousers and pleaded with me not to leave. Tears flowed down my face as I walked out of the main gate. I told my sisters about her and they helped me look for another employer. After a few days, she [the employer] came to the fong chai and apologized to me.
She and her two sisters acknowledged that they were well aware of their “lowly” position or status as servants. In spite of this, they expected employers to treat them with respect: e.g., to address amahs politely and to trust the women’s judgment in performing various household tasks.
Amah networks established rules and boundaries of employer-employee relations that mitigated physical and sexual abuse. Employers who verbally mistreated their domestic workers were quickly maligned throughout the networks, which could and did jeopardize employers’ future ability to hire amahs. In my interviews with the three amahs, I made the mistake of asking them about love and sex. All three women blushed and then verbally chastised me, a younger Malaysian Chinese woman, for even thinking that a Chinese male employer in that era would demand or dare to approach an amah for sexual favors.
I do not assert that physical or sexual harassment never occurred in any amah’s tenure as a domestic worker. Rather, amah networks acted as safety nets since they provided social, financial, and emotional support for their members. In short, the networks were well-developed self-help institutions of and for this particular generation of Chinese servants in colonial Malaya.
Chinese amahs of the 1930s generally enjoyed a reputation of lengthy and dedicated service to their non-European, specifically Chinese employers. Similarities in the ethnic background of employer and employee helped blur class differences. That is, Chinese amahs performed physical labor and what has been called “emotional” labor. 25 The emotionally intimate environment in which amahs cared for their employers’ babies or young children at times, could and did obscure their subordinate class position. The grandchildren of Ah Ling Cheh’s employer occasionally visited their retired amah bearing gifts of money and foodstuffs. Throughout my interview with Ah Ling Cheh, she referred to her employer’s grandchildren as if the latter were her own. 26
To complicate employer-employee relations even more, not only was an amah a surrogate mother to her employers’ children, but also depending on the context, she became a surrogate mother to her female employer. Below, Ah Foon Cheh describes a key aspect of her relationship to the employer:
She used to sit down with me during the early morning or afternoon, after the children had gone to school, and tell me how he [male employer] had a mistress and he kept her in an apartment that he bought for her across town. She said I was lucky because I did not have to experience her heartache. I told her that is precisely why I “sor hei” so that I didn’t have to feel used [by men]. But I also told her that she was lucky because she had wonderful children of her own.
Nevertheless, emotional labor performed by amahs in many instances did not fully conceal the superior-subordinate relationship. Differences between employer and employee’s use of time and space in the household markedly constructed and reinforced class differences. Amahs who were not baby nurses performed a variety of household tasks such as sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms: tasks considered too lowly and laborious for female employers who “specialized” in arranging flowers for the dining room table or selecting appropriate curtains to match the living room. Chinese servants rarely ate their meals together with employing families. Instead, meals were consumed in the kitchen, away from the more public areas in the house.
Ah Foon Cheh expressed amah class consciousness from a Buddhist perspective: she insisted that the quality of her present life was a reflection of what she had or had not done in past lives. She said, “We were servants; it was our mang sui [life’s destiny] to serve others. Perhaps we will be more fortunate in our next lives.” The class-religious nexus determined Chinese amahs’ sense of what was possible. A significant consequence was that the amahs of the 1930s took great pride in performing loyal and dedicated service to their employers. It can be argued, especially from the perspective of orthodox Marxism, that religion is a superstructural phenomenon constructed for elite manipulation of the masses, or that amah class consciousness reflected a sense of fatalistic resignation to class subordination. Even as religious beliefs mitigated the unconditional expression of class consciousness among amahs, they also functioned as a restraining force in employer-employee relations. The following is an example of the invocation of a religious belief to renegotiate employer-employee relations. Ah Ling Cheh narrated an incident in which the employer of one of her “sisters ” chastised the amah for “dragging her feet” in preparing the children’s lunch. The servant, who had kept quiet as her employer ranted and raved, finally said calmly: “Are you in a hurry to get your new birth certificate?” The female employer, having interpreted the amah’s question from a religious standpoint, fell silent and then apologized to the latter. The amah’s bold retort had invoked the karmatic danger of her employer’s impolite speech: reference to a new birth certificate for her employer implied that there would have been no guarantee that her soul would not reincarnate as a poor lowly human being at best, and an animal at worst if she continued to malign her servant.
Amah strategies for coping with European employers were different: they were told directly and indirectly to act like servants. In European households, they did not enjoy the special status, and many times deference, accorded by Chinese employers. Amahs were called by their first names without the “cheh” suffix, and they were required to wear black trousers and white tops/blouses as uniforms. Since then, the black-and-white uniform has characterized the 1930s generation of single and celibate amahs. 27 Chinese servants were required to use different sets of cooking utensils for themselves and for their European employers. Kenneth Gaw quotes an amah as having said that, “I didn’t like the idea of working for Europeans. You’d have to bring your own pots and pans along to do your own cooking. Also rice, oil, etc. It’s like a major move.” 28
European attitudes and behavior that reinforced class-racial differences meant that their reputations were more susceptible to amah gossip than were the reputations of the non-European employers:
Amahs working for expatriates tended to gossip more than those employed by local Chinese families. Of course, the amahs who were better treated would not gossip as much as those less well treated. Many who worked for the Chinese saw themselves as part of the families they served and thus, out of loyalty, would not gossip about them. This did not apply to the expatriates who were not considered as “family,” although some amahs working for expatriate employers were exceptionally loyal. 29
Ah Lan Cheh insisted that although most Europeans paid well, they also expected servants to know their social positions, hence defer to employers at all times: “They [Europeans] did not like it when their servants answered them back instead of keeping quiet. Sometimes it cannot be helped because they [Europeans] are so arrogant. They think they are so ‘grand’ but they don’t know everything.”
By the 1950s, the community of amahs was no longer exclusively restricted to single celibate Chinese migrant female servants. The specific sociocultural and economic circumstances of migrant women from Kwangtung meant that they were a finite group who could not reproduce the next generations of servants.
Amah-hood soon became synonymous with paid female reproductive labor in general as Malay, and Malayan-born Chinese and Indian women entered the ranks of domestic servants. Expanding the boundaries of the amah category meant that the nouns of maid, servant, girl, amah, and mui tsai were used interchangeably in reference to female domestic workers.
In 1958, it was reported that five hundred members of the Domestic Employee’s Union had asked state authorities to establish specific hours of work per day, annual and monthly holidays, workers’ insurance, and base salary. It is not known if the amahs of the 1930s belonged to the union. There was no record of any official response to the demands. 30
Toward the end of colonial rule, public discourse on independence and governance did not specifically include women or their participation in, and contribution to, activities in the public and private domains. Malay, Chinese, and Indian women’s interests were assumed to reflect that of their respective ethnic communities. 31
From The Home to The Factory Floor
There exists today a dearth of intellectual inquiry on the relationship between domestic service and development in postcolonial Malaysia. 32 On the one hand, it can be argued that the physical and social segregation of domestic service from public space and attention pose problems of access for researchers. On the other hand, the present black hole in our knowledge of postcolonial domestic service reflects the conventional wisdom that domestic service is not “real” or “productive work”: 33
Economically, domestic labour is invisible because it is not part of capitalist production which uses wages labour to produce commodities for the market. When performed by the housewife, domestic labour is unpaid, it produces use value without producing profit. In comparison to that of the housewife, the labour of the domestic servant is somewhat more visible because it is paid for. . . . However, intertwined as it is with intimate, personal relations, domestic labour is considered a private matter, a ‘labour of love.’ As such, it is ideologically invisible as a form of real work, a status that is hard to change even when it is paid for. 34
What is known is that in 1963, 3,000 out of 10,000 “War Department Amahs” went on strike for better working conditions. The women were servants of British military families stationed in Malaysia (again, it is not known if the original amahs participated in the strike). The Malayan Trades Union Congress (MTUC) even formed a committee to help organize the servants. Later in the year, the strike was called off because of Indonesia’s military action against the creation of the Federation of Malaysia (see chapter 2). 35
The 1970 Census Report in Malaysia neither provides statistics on the total number of female servants nor distinguishes between women who performed live-in, part-time, or day work. Nonetheless, it is estimated that more than 60 percent of all female rural out-migrants (Malay, Chinese, and Indian) worked as urban domestic servants, which was the second highest employment sector for women (the agricultural sector was the first). 36
The predominance of female rural out-migrants in urban domestic service prior to 1970 is related to the rate in which the processes of urbanization outpaced industrialization in Malaysia. Urban centers neither had the infrastructural support nor the employment opportunities to absorb large numbers of rural-urban migrants. Female migrants who found employment in urban areas were concentrated mostly in informal jobs such as domestic service that drew on the tradition of women’s perceived comparative advantage in performing household labor. 37
Since Malays were predominantly rural prior to the NEP, one may infer that many Malay female urban in-migrants might have and did work as domestic servants (especially prior to employment in FTZs). Azizah Kassim’s research on Malay squatter women and the informal economy indicates that some urban in-migrants worked as servants, although “working as domestic help especially a live-in domestic is considered very demeaning, thus it is only when no other means of employment in the informal sector is available that this type of job is taken. Even then, the domestic help and washerwomen worked on their own terms.” 38 She argues that Malay women’s reluctance to be live-in servants is related to the “stigma attached to the job; working for a household as a washerwoman or a cook is described as being hamba orang (literally, someone else’s slave), who, in the traditional Malay society of social stratification occupies the lowest stratum.” 39 As previously discussed, debt-bondage was practiced in precolonial and colonial Malaya. The association of live-in domestic service with the condition of enslavement remains today.
During the course of field research, I encountered a Malay day-worker who, in the 1970s, had migrated from a small village in Perak to Kuala Lumpur. Rosita bicycled to work in a middle-class Kuala Lumpur neighborhood five days a week. For more than ten years, she washed and ironed clothes, and swept and/or mopped floors for three families (from different ethnic and religious backgrounds). She chose day-work primarily because she had to care for her own children and that day-work gave her more freedom than live-in domestic service. None of her friends who performed paid housework lived in their employers’ houses, choosing instead to commute to work.
Rosita’s experience directly contradicts M. Jocelyn Armstrong’s study of Malaysian domestic workers in which she argues that Malay female urban in-migrants preferred to perform live-in domestic service because this particular category of work offered “protection from the perceived risks of big city living” and, at the same time, “freedom from female subordination within their own families” (conceivably back in the villages). 40 Indeed, the relative absence of scholarly interest in contemporary domestic service continues to be an effective barrier to a fuller and more complex understanding of different Malaysian women’s relations to development processes.
From the late 1960s, the trend in women’s employment began to shift from a concentration on “traditional” services, such as paid housework, to that of manufacturing work as a result of newly established FTZs. 41 Among new jobs created were sewing clothes and assembling electronic chips in factories. The gradual feminization of the manufacturing industry is evident in the increase in the number of female workers relative to male workers from 1970 to 1990 (see Table 3.1).
Table 3.1
Male and Female Employment in Manufacturing
| Year | Males | Females |
|---|---|---|
| 1970a | 235,377 | 111,017 |
| 1980 | 453,599 | 389,875 |
| 1985 | 479,400 | 371,000 |
| 1990 | 697,300 | 625,500 |
As the number of female factory workers increased, the supply of live-in servants began to decline. Newspaper headlines reflected the exodus of Malaysian servants from the home to the factory floor: “Fewer girls want to be maids,” “Amahs are fast becoming a vanishing breed,” “More girls seeking jobs in factories,” “Seremban in a fix over servant crisis,” “It’s not just fashionable for girls in Malacca.” 42
Malaysian women’s growing reluctance to work in the low-status and low-wage occupation of unlegislated live-in domestic service was captured by newspaper surveys. 43 For example, a former servant explained that: “[Factory work] is more interesting and has brighter prospects . . . and normally a domestic help is not properly treated by a fussy employer. Even if I was offered more pay, I would not become one.” 44
In an unpublished study of Malaysian servants, the major problem identified was the lack of legislative protection: servants labored under conditions of long work hours, low pay, and no rest days. 45 Alternative employment opportunities for women meant that those who had been working or could have worked as domestic servants either left their jobs or used the threat of alternative employment opportunities to make demands that could and did significantly alter employer-employee relations within the household. Women who remained in domestic service were specific in their demands to employers: higher wages, more rest days, and clearly delimited number of work hours per day. 46
Malaysian employers and potential employers, similar to their European predecessors only a few decades ago in colonial Malaya, openly complained in the newsprint media about domestic servants. Employers’ sense of desperation and anger grew as the decline in supply of servants appeared to encourage domestic workers’ threats to quit their jobs if demands for more rest-days, reduced working hours, and/or luxurious amenities in the workplace were not met by their employers. 47
During a few weeks stay in a lower middle class Setapak neighborhood, I interviewed two Chinese female shopkeepers who had worked as servants in the 1970s. Ah Kwan (who is now in her early forties) left her job to marry a Chinese man who sold fresh fruits at one of the farmers’ markets in Kuala Lumpur. The couple purchased a two-story building in Setapak: the first floor was used for their laundry business while the second floor housed their living quarters.
Ah Kwan had worked for two Chinese families before quitting her last job because her employer had refused to give her two rest days per month while prohibiting her from watching television. She left after her friends told her that she could easily find paid domestic work since it was a “seller’s market.” In the end, she opted to marry so that she could have children.
The other former domestic worker, Ah Mun, left her job in the late 1970s after having words with her female employer, who had attempted to deduct a portion of her wages after she had accidentally left a brown iron mark on a shirt. Even as she recalled the incident, she spat on the ground and cursed her former employers. She insisted that she was not even worried about the prospect of getting another job because “to live as a destitute human being was better than to be treated like a dog.” It did not take her long to find work: she was hired by a rattan furniture maker to handweave chairs and sofas.
In 1973, a newspaper article reported that the supply of domestic servants had declined so drastically that for several weeks, no women had registered to work with a major domestic employment agency. 48 Informal domestic employment agents also were affected by women’s declining interest in domestic service.
During the course of fieldwork in 1994, I met a Chinese taxi driver who used to be an informal employment agent: employers gave him a finder’s fee for recommending domestic servants from Chinese New Villages. 49 As he and I discussed my research while we were caught in a massive traffic jam in Kuala Lumpur, he told me that by the early 1980s, he was left with no choice other than to apply for a taxi driver’s badge because he could no longer persuade young Chinese women to be servants:
A couple asked me to get them a mui tsai. They offered nearly RM500 [in the early 1980s, wages for domestic servants were between RM200 to RM300] a month. And, do you know what the girl asked me? “Are there any rest days?” I said to her, “It is a live-in job, so probably once a month.” The girl laughed and said, “I want one and one half days off every week, just like office workers.” Naturally, I said that this couldn’t be the case, since she would be hired to serve the family. So I told her, “When they need you to do the work, you must do it.” Also, I told her that they were willing to pay her an even higher salary, only if she was good. Still, she refused to work as a mui-tsai. So, you can’t blame employers for hiring foreigners today because we are not willing to do the work.
The phrase for servant in Cantonese is kung yan, literally “work people.” The taxi driver’s uncritical word choice of mui tsai reflects the continued belief that Chinese female servants were considered not so much as workers than as girl-slaves. It is hardly surprising that Chinese women, when offered other opportunities, refused to work as domestic servants. Employers’ difficulty in hiring docile, low-wage servants was painfully clear when no women enrolled in the YWCA’s free courses designed to train young girls as domestic workers. 50
By the early 1980s, the Deputy Minister of Information, a woman, proposed promoting domestic service as a profession—to elevate the status of the job, legally and financially, in order to attract servants. Not only did the state fail to respond to the proposal, but also employers openly criticized the plan on the grounds that it would further incite employer-employee contestations over wages and working conditions:
Why do you have to raise these things in the papers? Even if the proposal does not come through, when my servant reads about how much other servants are being paid, she’ll start demanding for more money. If I come home at 11 pm, and she has to open the door, does she claim OT [overtime pay]? 51
The absence of a more structured work environment delineated and protected by labor legislation was the key issue in employer-employee contestations. State authorities failed to respond until 1987 when the Minister of Labour, a man, in reference to Filipina and Indonesian female servants’ complaints, presented the official rationale for not regulating domestic service: “We will have problems defining, for instance, their hours of work and the value of their accommodation given by their employers, if they were to be included in the Employment Act.” 52 Definitional problems became the “reason” for legislative silence on domestic service. Implicit in the minister’s rationale was the belief that since the household is synonymous with the private-domestic domain, it then ought to be free from state interference; and that female reproductive labor does not qualify as “work.”
A glaring contradiction in the official resistance to legislating domestic service surfaced in 1994, when the Minister of Human Resources asked Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers to stop airing their complaints in the newspapers. Requesting instead that they report all cases of employer abuse to his ministry, 53 he promised that his ministry “would take action if maids had evidence to substantiate their claims.” 54 The burden of proof is placed conveniently on domestic workers, and it is a responsibility that cannot possibly be met or enforced by law since there was and is no enforceable labor legislation delineating work hours or tasks in domestic service.
The specific gender-class-ethnic nexus inherited and perpetuated by the postcolonial state apparatus largely delineated official responses to employer-domestic worker complaints. Clause I of the First Schedule in the Employment Act 1955 covers “any person, irrespective of his occupation who has entered into a contract of service with an employer so long as such person’s wages do not exceed $750.00 a month.” According to this definition, a female domestic worker could be classified as an employee.
The Employment Act 1955 (Revised 1981) would define officially a domestic servant as
[A] person [male or female] employed in connection with the work of a private dwelling house and not in connection with any trade, business or profession carried on by the employer in such dwelling house and includes a cook, house servant, butler, child’s nurse, valet, footman, gardener, washerman or washerwomen, groom and driver or cleaner of any vehicle licensed for private use. 55
Yet, servants are conspicuously absent from the Employment Act’s categories of female workers who are given such rights as definite work hours per day, and maternity benefits and leave. Domestic workers are not even classified as workers in other key labor legislation that deal with worker benefits and rights: the Employee Provident Fund Ordinance 1951, the Employee Social Security Ordinance 1969, and the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1952. 56
The official position toward domestic service reveals more than the pervasiveness of public patriarchy or the practice of patriarchal ideology in public institutions, legislation and policies. In the aftermath of the 1969 ethnic riots between Malays and Chinese, it would have been politically untenable for the predominantly Malay/UMNO-controlled state apparatus to be seen as actively encouraging Malay women to work in the low-status and low-wage occupation of domestic service. 57 This would have contradicted what is arguably the main objective of the NEP—i.e., the promise to enforce the upward socioeconomic mobility of Malays in relation to the non-Malay (read: Chinese) community.
Employers who were disgusted by the seemingly arrogant attitudes of Malaysian servants, and who were frustrated by the increasing difficulty in employing docile household help, began to illegally hire female servants from Indonesia and the Philippines.
Enter The Foreign Maid: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian State
During the 1970s, revenues from commodity exports allowed the two successive Prime Ministers, Tun Abdul Razak and Tun Hussein Onn, and their respective cabinets to increase public-sector expenditure for education and employment. Malaysia’s emerging dual labor market structure evolved as a result of a development path that heightened expectations and expanded employment opportunities for Malays specifically, and for Malaysians in general. 58
The presence of illegal migrants—foreign female domestic workers, and male and female plantation and construction workers—were detected in Malaysia as early as the 1970s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, inherent in non-Malay complaints about illegal migrant workers was the belief that the Malay-controlled state apparatus allowed the presence of the illegal Indonesian migrants—many of whom are similar to Malays in ethnic, cultural, and religious affiliations—so as to increase the Malay population. Meanwhile, low-wage labor demands of agriplantations continued to rise as a result of the NEP’s pro-Malay urbanization policy within the context of export-oriented development. The official response was to maintain the status quo: Malaysian employment of illegal migrant workers was neither banned or regulated.
Public “rediscovery” of illegal migrant workers during the 1985–87 economic recession led to renewed outcries from various groups in society. The MTUC, which had supported “War Department amahs” in the early 1960s, reasoned that Malaysian employers preferred foreign servants because the latter were willing to work for lower wages, and that they “carried out their jobs diligently and rarely left the confines of the house for fear of detection by Authorities.” 59 In spite of and because of this observation, the MTUC did not act on behalf of or against Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. 60
Employers defended their right to hire low-wage migrant workers from abroad as a major way to keep down costs and to solve labor shortage problems. At the very same time, politicians from the three major ethnic groups and various labor unions insisted that the state officially regulate foreign labor in-migration. This fragmentation of interests within society was mirrored in the manner in which the Labour and Home Affairs ministries dealt with the issue of foreign migrant workers.
The Labour Ministry, which coincidentally was led by a Chinese man, moved to protect Malaysian workers and conceivably to ensure interethnic balance, since most of the illegal workers in Peninsular Malaysia were Indonesians. The more powerful Home Affairs Ministry, however, was controlled by Malays (Dr. Mahathir Mohamad held the positions of Home Affairs Minister and Prime Minister), who allegedly were interested in increasing the Malay population (by counting illegal Indonesian workers as Malays, or by issuing illegal Indonesian workers with identity cards given to naturalized citizens) vis-á-vis the non-Malay populations. 61
The Minister of Labour banned all migrant laborers from entering the country in September 1986: “The Labour Ministry has taken steps to stop totally the employment of foreigners to work as domestic servants and estate workers. It has advised the Immigration Department not to allow such workers to enter the country, Labour Minister Datuk Lee Kim Sai said.” 62 Only a few months later, the Malay Deputy Home Affairs Minister Datuk Megat Junid lifted the ban on Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, “after considering public complaints on the shortage of domestic help.” 63 The Labour Ministry explained to the public that while the Home Affairs Ministry had the power to override the ban on foreign female domestic workers, the Labour Ministry would continue to help unemployed Malaysian domestic servants find work.
During the ban on foreign domestic workers, Malay women entered the public debate on foreign versus local servants when Wanita UMNO (UMNO Women) publicly requested state authorities to consider training 30,000 unemployed women who had registered as domestic workers with the Labour Ministry. 64 The official response again was to remain characteristically silent on the issue.
To be sure, it was not politically feasible for the Malay/UMNO-controlled state to openly encourage Malay women to work as domestic servants, particularly during a period in which the state was confronted by criticisms within the Malay community that the NEP had only benefitted mostly wealthy Malays who already enjoyed unobstructed access to state bureaucrats and resources. The state elite could not but refrain from directly responding to Wanita UMNO’s proposal of training unemployed Malaysian women.
Instead in 1986&-;87, the Immigration Department (housed within the Home Affairs Ministry), established guidelines for privately owned domestic employment agencies (DOMs) to recruit female domestic workers from Indonesia and the Philippines. 65 DOMs and employers in this study said that in the late 1980s, rules of eligibility were implemented for those who wished to employ foreign servants. Specifically, employers’ petitions for permission to hire Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers had to include employers’ marriage certificates, their children’s birth certificates, and copies of the Borang J personal income tax return as evidence that employers earned sufficient income to pay foreign domestic workers’ monthly salaries.
The family (marriage and birth certificates) and income rules, as I call them, were not made public in the newspapers until 1989, and then mostly in the form of question-answer columns. 66 In these columns, employers who were not sure of the Immigration Department’s rules would write to the newspaper editor who, in turn, requested clarification from the Immigration Department. The questions and answers were printed in the same newspaper column.
In 1989, a representative of the Immigration Department answered a potential employer’s query. The applicant, who had three children, previously had been denied permission to employ a foreign domestic worker because she failed to furnish an official marriage certificate (she had not gone through a civil marriage ceremony). This particular case was printed in the New Straits Times with the headline “No Maid Until Couple Gets Married.” The Immigration Department’s explanation was that although the woman had submitted her children’s birth certificates, she had failed to include her marriage certificate. 67 The marriage and birth certificate rules would be key to normalizing and nurturing a particular form of the modern caring Malaysian family. Chapter 6 presents a detailed analysis of the relationship between this immigration rule and the official effort to redraw the boundaries of public and private morality during the NEP period.
Employers interviewed in this study mentioned that in the late 1980s, the income rule required employers to earn RM50,000 per annum if they wanted to hire Filipina servants. There was no preset income requirement for those who wanted to hire Indonesian women. At that time, a Filipina servant’s monthly salary was approximately RM350–400, while an Indonesian servant’s salary was anywhere between RM0–180 (depending on whether or not she was an indentured domestic worker). In 1994, the annual income qualification levels were as follows: a combined household income of RM48,000 was required to employ a Filipina servant with a monthly salary of RM500; and a combined household income of RM24,000 was required to qualify for an Indonesian servant with a monthly salary of RM300–330.
Whether the focus is on the late 1980s or 1994, there exists a substantial difference in annual income qualification levels for Malaysians to employ domestic workers from different nationalities. The income rule ensures that employers of Filipina and Indonesian servants respectively are able to pay their employees.
Taken on its own terms, the income rule is not controversial. However, when analyzed together with other employment rules implemented by the Immigration Department, it sheds light on the nature of state regulation of the employment of foreign domestic workers.
From the late 1980s to 1991, the income and family rules were publicized in major newspapers: employers must be married with children and they also must furnish the Borang J forms that specified annual incomes. In October 1991, when the state announced its policy of deporting all illegal Indonesian domestic workers by the end of the year, representatives from the Home Affairs Ministry and the Immigration Department insisted that there was a third rule which had been in effect since official regulation of foreign domestic workers began in 1986–87.
That third rule was the “religion” rule, which stated that only Muslims were allowed to employ Indonesian-Muslim servants. 68 In other words, the Home Affairs Ministry insisted that Malays had to employ Indonesian servants whereas non-Malay/non-Muslim employers could hire only Filipina (Christian) servants. As will be discussed shortly, although this particular rule was not publicized until October 1991, the Malaysian public was well aware of its existence.
Analysis of the three employment rules within the larger politics of socioeconomic restructuring in Malaysia reveals the implied objectives in official regulation of the in-migration and employment of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. The income rule established the basis for inclusion and exclusion into the Malaysian middle classes. Within the middle classes, the religion rule was used to demarcate intraclass ethnoreligious boundaries since only Malay-Muslim employers were allowed to hire Indonesian servants who, in turn, had to be Muslims. Since there was a lower income requirement level to hire Indonesian servants, then it could be inferred that Malay employment of domestic workers was subsidized by the state. The family rule that required marriage and children’s birth certificates was expected to construct and legitimize the middle classes’ adoption of the nuclear family form.
During a period in which the NEP was criticized on different fronts by different groups of peoples, the income and religion rules facilitated state elites’ ability to “objectify” middle-class boundaries as proof that the choice of development path had benefitted more than a group of politico-bureaucrats and their supporters. Not so coincidentally, the employment rules were established in 1986–87, the same period of political in-fighting within UMNO—the ruling Malay political party—as members debated the future direction of the NEP. “Team A” (Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and supporters) argued that the NEP had benefitted the majority of Malays. “Team B” (Musa Hitam and supporters) insisted that the NEP had nurtured a group of corrupt businessmen and politicians, thus further marginalizing the majority of Malays.
Foreign female domestic workers would become boundary-markers for and of the expanding Malaysian middle classes. Simply put, the presence of foreign servants was to be read as evidence that development had benefitted Malaysians. Within the middle classes, Malay employment of Indonesian servants was subsidized by the state via the income and religion rules.
There were unintended or unanticipated consequences that arose from the income and religion rules. Non-Malays, whose income was insufficient to allow them to employ Filipinas, simultaneously failed to qualify for employing Indonesian servants if they were not Muslims. Those who were denied state permission turned to the illegal route of employing Indonesian servants.
In October 1991, it was officially announced that state authorities would deport all illegal Indonesian servants on the premise that their numbers had reached unacceptable levels (to this day, the exact number of illegal Indonesian servants has not been made public—see the following chapter for more detail). Deputy Home Affairs Minister Datuk Megat Junid insisted at a press conference that, “All employers of illegal Indonesian maids have up to Dec 31 to surrender them to the Immigration Depart-ment to avoid prosecution.” 69 A few days later, “Datuk Megat Junid said the Government did not allow Indonesian maids to work in non-Muslim households but it could consider special cases [emphasis mine].” 70
Immigration and police officials embarked on a house-to-house search for illegal Indonesian servants. 71 Of significance is that while the Immigration Department refused to process any work permits for illegal Indonesian servants (choosing instead to deport the women), the Department continued to process the work permit applications of illegal Indonesian male and female workers in the plantation and construction sectors. 72
The illegal status of many Indonesian servants was not the only reason for the deportation policy. Non-Malay/non-Muslim middle class employers had blurred the neat boundaries constructed by the religion rule of “only Muslim (Indonesian) servants with Muslim (predominantly Malay) employers.”
Since most illegal Indonesian servants migrated with the help of labor brokers called taikong, who literally sold the women to employers in order to recoup costs, then even working-class employers could afford to hire illegal Indonesian servants: it was not necessary to pay indentured workers any wages for a considerable length of time. Hawker stalls at farmers’ markets and pasar malam or neighborhood night markets became illegal domestic employment agencies. 73 Working-class employers had blurred the boundaries constructed by the employment rules for inclusion into, and exclusion from, the middle classes.
The official response was to apply coercion to reconstruct intraclass and interclass ethnoreligious boundaries that had been traversed: all illegal Indonesian servants were to be found and deported immediately. There also was a financial rationale to the deportation policy: extra-legal DOMs had been accumulating profit at the expense of legally registered DOMs, thus future state revenue.
Despite the expectations of the state authorities, the responses of Malaysians did not fall along specific ethnoreligious lines. Employers from all ethnic groups complained vehemently of the planned deportation of Indonesian servants. Malays and non-Malays publicly questioned the religion rule. 74 Even renowned Islamic scholars voiced their objections to the rule and deportation policy. 75
A key DOM response to sustained employer demands for Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in the wake of the deportation threat was to request state permission to recruit women from other labor-sending countries such as Sri Lanka. 76 A Chinese member of parliament introduced the motion to recruit domestic servants from East Asia. 77 If granted, the mass in-migration of servants from South and East Asia possibly could tip the population distribution in favor of the Malaysian Indian and Chinese communities.
A few months after the official announcement that illegal Indonesian servants would be deported, the religion rule was rescinded. The Immigration Department issued a statement that allowed employers to hire either Filipina or Indonesian servants. Non-Muslim employers had to ensure that Muslim servants’ religious practices would not be subordinated to or reviled by work environments. 78 Muslim employers were allowed to hire Filipina servants (most of whom were Christians), so long as there were no children in the household. 79 The Immigration Department still required children’s birth certificates as one of the prerequisites to employ a Filipina or an Indonesian domestic worker.
Representatives from the twenty DOMs with whom I spoke insisted that with the exception of the religion rule, the Immigration Department’s requirements had remained unchanged in 1994. A potential employer would have to furnish the Department with marriage and children’s birth certificates, and the Borang J income tax return. Several DOM representatives, however, offered to help me draft a letter petitioning the Department for permission to employ a servant even if I was neither married nor had children. Yet, I was told that unless I knew someone “powerful,” my chances of securing state approval were slim. Other DOM representatives suggested that I financially compensate a friend for using her name and address (provided that she was married and had children, and neither planned to, nor already had employed a foreign domestic worker) in my application to the Department.
State regulation of the in-migration and employment of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers was key to the defense of the NEP during the mid to late 1980s. This is not to argue that the in-migration of domestic workers was the state elite’s solution to accusations of corruption, rentierism, and patronage. Rather, official regulation of the in-migration and placement of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers objectified the social and material boundaries of the Malay and non-Malay middle classes.
The in-migration of Indonesian and Filipina servants facilitates state elites’ efforts to garner consent from emerging key social forces, i.e., the middle classes, for the continued expansion of the path of export-oriented development. Within the institution of contemporary domestic service, employment rules were applied to manipulate specific intersections of class-gender-ethnicity-religion-nationality, in order to address the political challenges to the NEP, and to meet the household needs of the expanding Malaysian middle classes in a way that continued to free working-class Malaysian women to participate mostly in manufacturing industries rather than domestic service.
The historical development of the state’s relation to the institution of domestic service is characterized by markedly similar and dissimilar patterns. Twice in the twentieth century, colonial and postcolonial state authorities in Malaysia opened the immigration gates temporarily to solve employer-domestic worker contestations over working conditions and wages. Whereas the British refused to intervene further in the employment of amahs, the postcolonial state proceeded to construct rules governing the in-migration and employment of foreign servants to achieve specific objectives.
In the 1930s, Southern Chinese women’s desire to remain financially and socially independent from men in the midst of political and socioeconomic turmoil led to the in-migration of amahs. The amah migratory chain was shaped largely by Chinese women’s informal networks of “sisters.” Upon arrival in Malaya, amah networks could and did exert control over conditions in which their members performed paid reproductive labor. In time, amahs gained the reputation of hardworking loyal servants.
Today, the case of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers is distinctly different from the amahs. The following chapter examines the global and regional contexts from which the transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor emerges, and analyzes the women’s migratory and employment mechanisms.
Note on the Epigraph
Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Hill and Wang, 1988), p. 47.
Endnotes
Note 1: Linzi Manicom, “Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History,” Journal of African History 33, no. 3 (1992): 441–465. Back.
Note 2: J. D. Vaughan, The Mannerisms and Customs of the Straits Chinese (London: Oxford University Press, 1879). Back.
Note 3: J. M. Gullick wrote that the institution of debt-bondage was somewhat similar to slavery in that debt-bondspeople were not guaranteed their freedom even after a period of service to their creditors. A Malay man or woman who borrowed money from, and who could not repay the debt to a ruler or chief consequently became a debt-bondsman or woman to the creditor. Freedom from debt-bondage did not depend on calculating the value of labor performed on behalf of the creditor. Rather, freedom from debt bondage was granted at the discretion of the creditor. In traditional Malay society, debt-bondspeople were still considered members of society since most were taken to live with their creditor-masters. Slaves, however, belonged outside of society. According to Gullick, since Islamic law prohibited the enslavement of Muslims, slaves in traditional Malay society were “Africans, aborigines, and Bataks (a non-Muslim Sumatran tribe)” (Indigenous Political System of the Malays [London: Athlone Press, 1958], p. 104). For the discussion of the debates on distinguishing between Malay debt-slaves and debt-bondspersons, see Wazir Jahan Karim, Women and Culture: Between Malay Adat and Islam (Boulder: Westview, 1992), pp. 72–79. Back.
Note 4: Gullick, Indigenous Political System, pp. 103–4. “A chief thus gained two objects. He had the means of attracting to him men in search of mistresses and ultimately wives. Secondly by providing his followers with the means of satisfying their sexual needs at home the chief prevented them from making forays among his peasant subjects to seduce or abduct their women. No doubt the chief had first to abduct some of these women himself under a more or less legal procedure.” Back.
Note 6: Vaughan, Mannerisms and Customs, p. 21 Back.
Note 7: In fact, Lai Ah Eng argued that Chinese secret societies’ control over the wage and working conditions of Chinese male domestic servants further reinforced the mui-tsai system in Malaya. Chinese employers, upset with the demands of male servants, turned to young Chinese girls who not only performed housework for free, but also eventually could become future mistresses or daughters-in-law (Peasants, Proletarians, and Prostitutes: A Preliminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malay, Research Notes and Discussion Papers, no. 59 [Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1986], p. 28). Back.
Note 8: For a discussion of successive transformations in colonial perceptions of Malays, see Charles Hirschmann, “The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia: An Analysis of Census Classification,” Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (1987): 555–582. Back.
Note 9: Vaughan, Mannerisms and Customs, p. 20. Back.
Note 10: This also was the case with Chinese male servants on the west coast of the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and with African-American male slaves in the South. See Mary Romero, M.A.I.D. in the USA (London: Routledge, 1992); David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese-American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 11: Vaughan, Mannerisms and Customs, pp. 14–18 Back.
Note 12: Straits Times September 18, 1933. Back.
Note 14: Fatimah Halim, “The Transformation of the Malaysian State,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 20, no. 1 (1990): 68. Back.
Note 15: Straits Times September 18, 1933. Back.
Note 16: Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 87. Gaw’s study is based on oral histories of amahs. To date, it is the only comprehensive published study of amahs in colonial Malaya. Back.
Note 17: Ibid., p. 44. According to Gaw (citing T. C. Lai’s edited volume Things Chinese [Hong Kong: Swindon Book Co., 1979]), the movement began as a distinctly female custom in the district of Shun Tak. Many young village women refused to marry men who were chosen by their parents. If women were forced to marry, then some could and did resist by committing suicide. Whenever the parents of a young servant insisted that their daughter get married, her group of young servant-friends would hold a funeral rite for her. The funeral rite was symbolic of the death of her economic and social independence. Back.
Note 19: The Star March 6, 1994. Back.
Note 20: “Ah” is the prefix attached to Malaysian Chinese first names in everyday speech. Back.
Note 21: Gaw, Superior Servants, chapter eight. Back.
Note 22: The Star March 6, 1994. Back.
Note 23: Gaw, Superior Servants, p. 130. Chinese women earned between (Malayan dollars) $5–$10 per month working for Chinese employers, and between $8–$15 working for European employers. In the 1950s, Chinese employers paid female servants $90–$120 a month, while Europeans paid servants between $130–$170 a month. Back.
Note 24: In comparing the working conditions of Filipina and Indonesian servants with that of amahs, Noeleen Heyzer and Vivian Wee write that: “[The amah] has the protection of her guild and the unwritten understanding of the employing household in that the servant cannot be subject to instant dismissal. She must have control over her labour activities and her labour cannot be called upon after a certain hour of the night” (“Lessons from the Kongsi Fong System of Guangdong Province, China,” Issues in Gender and Development, no. 5 [1993]: 16). Back.
Note 25: Romero, M.A.I.D., p. 106. Back.
Note 26: During the interviews, I learned more about various aspects of her “children’s” lives than I did her life. Ah Ling Cheh’s “son,” who recently graduated from an English university, told her that he planned to marry an Englishwoman. She was visibly upset because she wanted grandchildren of her own race. Back.
Note 27: “In fact, the familiar black and white dress of the amahs has been attributed to the British. They liked their servants to look neat and to have a recognizable uniform—to be identifiably ‘servants.’ ” Gaw, Superior Servants, p. 105. Back.
Note 30: Straits Times October 18, 1958. I was not able to trace the origins of the Domestic Employee’s Union or its fate beyond 1958. The three amahs in this study were not aware of the labor union. Back.
Note 31: For a comparative analysis of ethnic women’s participation in the three major political parties in Malaysia, UMNO, MCA, and MIC, see Virginia Dancz, Women and Party Politics in Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 32: The relative absence of studies of contemporary domestic service is made most salient in a comprehensive bibliography of Malaysian women and development entitled Status and Role of Malaysian Women in Development: A Bibliographic Essay that was compiled by the Bibliographic Project Team led by Khoo Siew Mun (Kuala Lumpur: Faculty of Economics, University of Malaya; National Population and Family Development Board, Ministry of National Unity and Social Development, 1992). There were no citations to paid domestic service in sections on “Women in Economic Production by Sector,” “Women in Employment,” “Home Economics, Household and Housekeeping,” and “Maternal and Childcare.” Back.
Note 33: As opposed to research on female factory workers, especially since the late 1960s. Examples of oft cited research are that of Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Linda Y.C. Lim, Women Workers in Multinational Corporations: The Case of the Electronic Industry in Malaysia and Singapore, Occasional Papers, no. 9 (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1987); and Janet Salaff and Aline K. Wong, “Women Workers: Factory, Family and Social Class in an Industrializing Order,” in Women in the Urban and Industrial Workforce: Southeast and East Asia, ed. Gavin W. Jones, Monograph no. 33 (Canberra: Development Studies Centre, The Australian National University, 1984).
To argue that domestic service in Malaysia is ignored as an area of intellectual inquiry because domestic servants are women, is without foundation since there continue to be studies of women in factory work, and so forth. Rather, it is to argue that the study of domestic service is ignored primarily because it is ascribed “nonwork” performed by women in the private domain that, in turn, is perceived as synonymous with women’s space. Back.
Note 34: Sedef Arat-Koc, “In the Privacy of Our Own Homes: Foreign Domestic Workers as a Solution to the Crisis in the Domestic Sphere in Canada,” Studies in Political Economy 28 (1989): 37–58. Back.
Note 35: Straits Times September 19, 1963. Back.
Note 36: Siew Ean Khoo, and Peter Pirie, “Female Rural to Urban Migration in Peninsular Malaysia,” in Women in the Cities of Asia: Migration and Urban Adaptation, eds. James T. Fawcett, Siew Ean Khoo, and Peter C. Smith (Boulder: Westview, 1984), p. 136. Back.
Note 37: Fawcett, Khoo, and Smith, eds., Women in the Cities of Asia; Jamilah Ariffin, Women and Development in Malaysia (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1992); and Hing Ai Yun, “Women and Work in West Malaysia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 14, no. 2 (1984): 204–218. Back.
Note 38: Azizah Kassim, “The Squatter Women and the Informal Economy: A Case Study,” in Women and Employment in Malaysia, eds. Hing Ai Yun and Rokiah Talib (Kuala Lumpur: Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Malaya; Women’s Association; Asia Pacific and Development Centre, 1986), p. 52. For a discussion on urban squatter settlements, see Nurizan Yahaya, “A Profile of the Urban Poor in Malaysia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 21, no. 2 (1991): 212–227. Back.
Note 39: Azizah Kassim, “Squatter Women,” p. 52. Back.
Note 40: M. Jocelyn Armstrong, “Female Household Workers in Industrializing Malaysia,” in At Work in Homes: Household Workers in World Perspectives, eds. Roger Sanjek and Shellee Colen (Washington D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1990), pp. 156–157. Back.
Note 41: Jamilah Ariffin, Women and Development, pp. 46–47. Back.
Note 42: Straits Times (which later became New Straits Times) August 11, 1967; New Straits Times May 15, 1973; November 20, 1974; October 16, 1978; and June 7, 1981. Back.
Note 43: New Straits Times May 15, 1973 and June 28, 1975; and Malay Mail May 27, 1976. Back.
Note 44: New Straits Times June 29, 1975. Back.
Note 45: L. K. Yap, Domestic Servants in Malaysia: A Sociolegal Study, Faculty of Law, University of Malaya, 1984. Back.
Note 46: New Straits Times April 15, 1974. Back.
Note 47: Ibid., April 15, 1974; March 31, 1974; July 17, 1973; June 1, 1976; June 25, 1975; September 26, 1976; June 7, 1980; and July 10, 1980. Back.
Note 48: Ibid., February 1, 1973. Back.
Note 49: Chinese New Villages were established by the British during the 1950s along the peripheries of urban centers. The intent was to contain Chinese peasant support for, and communist penetration into, rural areas. Villagers were rounded up and relocated to these centers. See Judith Strauch, Chinese Village Politics in the Malaysian State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). Back.
Note 50: New Straits Times June 27, 1973. During the 1920s and in another part of the world, the San Francisco Bay Area’s YWCA also offered housekeeping classes to Japanese immigrant women (Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride). Back.
Note 51: New Straits Times June 6, 1982. Back.
Note 52: Ibid., June 23, 1987. Back.
Note 53: The Ministry of Labour was renamed the Ministry of Human Resources in the late 1980s. Back.
Note 54: The Star April 27, 1994. Back.
Note 55: Raja Rohana Raja Mamat, The Role and Status of Malay Women in Malaysia: Social and Legal Perspectives (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1991), p. 52. Back.
Note 56: Jamilah Ariffin, Women and Development, pp. 104–107. Back.
Note 57: Hing Ai Yun argued that: “[I]n Malaysia, religious inhibitions on women working outside the home have alleviated somewhat pressures to socialize childcare but to resort to other alternative sources of labor—immigrants. Politically, this could be the more acceptable solution to the current labor shortage in selected sectors of the economy.” (“Women and Work in West Malaysia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 14, no. 2 [1984]: 214.) In a footnote clarifying “religious inhibitions,” Hing writes, “This is probably relevant more for the Muslim community than for the Chinese.” See chapter 6 for further discussion. Back.
Note 58: “As in other countries, rural-urban migration was induced by higher expectations among educated rural youths, the decline of agricultural jobs in the occupational prestige scale, and a desire for social independence (Lim, 1988a: 124). However, in Malaysia the outflow was exacerbated by the establishment of labor-intensive factories where wage and working conditions were better than in the plantations, and by the NEP, which encouraged the participation of rural youths in urban activities.” Patrick Pillai, People on the Move: An Overview of Recent Immigration and Emigration in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Institute of Strategic and International Studies, 1992), p. 7. Back.
Note 59: New Straits Times June 25, 1986. Back.
Note 60: It can be argued that the MTUC’s labor organizing power has been severely restrained since 1975 when the Registrar of Trade Unions prohibited MTUC from organizing workers in TNC-owned factories. See Rohana Ariffin, “Women and Trade Unions in West Malaysia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 19, no. 1 (1989): 78–94. In 1988, the state allowed the establishment of in-house electronics unions following the U.S. threat to drop Malaysia from the Generalized Special Preferences (GSP) list. The nature of the MTUC’s response to foreign female domestic workers may also indicate that the particularities of nationality have yet to be transcended in the construction of transnational labor rights. Back.
Note 61: Richard Dorall, “Foreign Workers in Malaysia: Issues and Implications of Recent Illegal Economic Migrants from the Malay World,” in Asian and Pacific Development Centre, The Trade in Domestic Helpers: Causes, Mechanisms, and Consequences (Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1989), p. 299. Back.
Note 62: New Straits Times October 18, 1986. Back.
Note 63: Ibid., December 11, 1986. Back.
Note 64: Malay Mail January 10, 1987 Back.
Note 65: Ibid., May 10, 1987. Back.
Note 66: New Straits Times January 12, 1989. Back.
Note 68: New Straits Times October 26, 1991. Back.
Note 69: Ibid., “Datuk Megat Junid also said that Indonesian maids of the Christian faith would be deported as the regulations state that Indonesia maids must be Muslim.” Back.
Note 70: The Star October 28, 1991. Back.
Note 71: See New Straits Times, Malay Mail, The Star, and Business Times, October 26, 1991. Back.
Note 72: Business Times October 21, 1991. Back.
Note 73: Malay Mail December 14, 1991. Back.
Note 74: For interviews of middle class Malaysian employers’ view of the state’s deportation policy, see The Star October 27, 1991. Back.
Note 75: New Straits Times November 4, 1991. Back.
Note 76: The Star November 9, 1991. Back.
Note 77: Ibid., December 18, 1991. Back.
Note 78: Hence, the unspoken rule of “no pork meat, no dog in the household.” Back.
Note 79: New Straits Times December 18, 1991. Back.
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