In Service and Servitude

Christine B.N. Chin

Columbia University Press

1998

5. Infrapolitics of Domestic Service: Strategies of, and Resistances to, Control

 

A maid has to be trained and initiated into the running of your household. . . . Once [sic] of the major problems people face is on the treatment of domestic help. Are they to be treated as equals? I would be inclined to say NO! The relationship is similar to a managing director and his chauffeur.

—Mrs. T. D. Ampikaipakan, “Social Etiquette” Columnist of The Star, 1993

Sometimes I tell her [employer] not to scream at me. I have ears, I am not deaf. Last time, she used to scold me, but now, no more. I told her that I am good at doing my work. I am proud of my work. If she tell[s] me to do something, she only tell[s] me once and I do it. I told her, “Don’t follow me around and check on my work. What I steal your things for? If I want to steal, I will be a thief, OK? Not a maid!”

—“Louisa,” a Filipina domestic worker in Kuala Lumpur, April 1994

 

Filipina and Indonesian servants’ working relations and conditions in the 1990s are markedly different from Chinese amahs of the past. Neither state authorities nor employers prevented amahs from reconstructing their social networks of chi mui (“sisters”) in Malaya. Ethnoreligious proximities of many employers and amahs also shaped employer-domestic worker relations: informal rules of interaction checked employers’ exercise of power and control in the household.

Today, Filipina and Indonesian servants have neither the freedom to move about in public space nor the mutual understanding with their employers (even when some are from similar ethnoreligious backgrounds) about informal or unwritten rules of conduct. State authorities’ raids on public places that are frequented by foreign female domestic workers, and press coverage of arrests of illegal and legal foreign domestic workers who engage in illegal activities, exacerbate the already unequal distribution and exercise of power in employer-servant relations.

In the attempt to prevent legal problems that can and do arise from hiring Filipina and Indonesian servants who are accused of committing illegal/criminal acts on their rest days, Malaysian female employers become supervisor-spies in the private-domestic domain. The interplay of public and private surveillance reinforces the notion that Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are objects to be controlled rather than workers who exchange domestic labor for wages.

The social construction of foreign female domestic workers as criminals at best, and as objects as worst, portrays a picture of Filipina and Indonesian women as passive victims powerless to challenge or to change the perceptions, attitudes, and behavior of employers. Several important questions arise from such a picture: How do the domestic workers perceive their relationship with employers and even with the Malaysian public? Can and do the women challenge incidences in which they are mistreated and abused by their employers, and also the overall negative representations of their presence in society? If so, how?

This chapter presents an analysis of employer-servant relations from the perspective of the infrapolitics of domestic service. Infrapolitics denote the politics of marginalized or subordinate groups such as peasants, slaves, and servants. ₁ Normally, infrapolitical activities are not openly expressed, mainly because of existing power imbalances that inhere in the dyadic relationships of the master-slave, landowner-peasant, and employer-domestic worker.

It is important to emphasize that infrapolitical activities are not defined only by the subordinate party’s challenges to the conditions under which labor is exacted by the dominant party. Rather, infrapolitical activities embody contestations over the processes of identity construction, of which the symbolic and material dimensions of class are intertwined with gender, race-ethnicity, religion, and nationality.

Analysis of the infrapolitics of subordinate groups involves identifying and juxtaposing what are called the “public” and “hidden transcripts.” In the case of domestic service, the public transcript refers to the ways in which employers overtly establish their superiority within and beyond the workplace, and servants’ subsequent manifest acts of deference/subservience/acquiescence. It is the story of domestic service narrated from the perspective of the dominant party: “The public transcript is, to put it crudely, the self portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen.” ₂

In my conversations with employers, and also my observations of employer-servant relations, I find two key interrelated characteristics in the public transcript of domestic service in Malaysia. First, the employment and supervision of foreign female domestic workers facilitate the construction of middle-class identity in the domestic domain. Second, and within the context of negative public discourse and various punitive measures of the Immigration Department, employers have assumed uncritically the role of domestic spies of foreign servants. Certain types of employer-related abuse result from the combination of employer supervision and surveillance of Filipina and Indonesian servants.

The hidden transcript consists of what the domestic workers say and do beyond the realm of the public transcript. It is Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ version of how and why they are treated in particular ways, and their responses to employers’ behavior. Inherent in the hidden transcript of domestic service are the infrapolitical activities of servants, or “forms of disguised, low profile, undeclared resistance” carried out singularly and collectively by Filipina and Indonesian women who are denied legal protection and rights as workers and as human beings. ₃

The chapter begins with a brief discussion of conceptualizing domestic workers as political actors. This is followed by an examination of key characteristics of the public transcript of domestic service. In the final section, the hidden transcript is made visible and analyzed, i.e., Filipina and Indonesian servants’ responses that attempt to redefine, successfully and unsuccessfully, the material and symbolic conditions in which they perform paid reproductive labor.

 

Maids as Political Actors?

Mainstream political theorists since the Aristotelian era conceptualize and legitimize the conduct of politics, a key dimension of social life, as an activity located solely in the public domain. In classical political philosophy, the public domain that embodied political space, life, and activities was reserved for men whose civil-political rights were constituted by and constituted their ability to move freely between the public and private/domestic domains. ₄ In this class-based and gendered schemata, women were constructed and segregated in the domestic domain as nonpolitical persons whose roles and status were predetermined by their capacities to reproduce and nurture future generations.

Even in modern times, with the granting of suffrage to women in Europe and North America, the notion of what constitutes politics and who can be political actors depends on the public-private distinction. The underlying assumption is that men are always political actors and that women, only when they act in public space—i.e., like men—can be political actors. ₅

In postcolonial Malaysia, state structures support the political participation of Malaysian men and women in public space and activities (whether it is “public” narrowly defined as the legislative arena, or “public” broadly conceptualized to include participation in the formal economy). Nevertheless through acts of omission and commission, foreign female domestic workers are not recognized and treated as political actors. While labor unions remain the major avenue of formal political participation for workers in many countries of the world including Malaysia, state authorities prohibit all categories of migrant or “guest” workers from participating in organized labor. In 1993, a representative of the Johor state government said that, “If workers insist on forming unions to represent their interests, employers can refer the matter to the Immigration Department or the Home Ministry for further action.” ₆

The irony, in the case of foreign female domestic workers, is that the state’s ban on the unionization of migrant workers is moot since labor legislation does not even consider servants as workers. Filipina and Indonesian servants in Malaysia, indeed, are victims in the sense that they cannot act in ways that we have come to expect of workers who express their grievances via formal political channels, and who physically, and at times forcibly or aggressively, renegotiate power relations in the workplace by participating in collective action such as strikes.

We cannot assume, however, that all domestic workers are powerless to redefine employer-employee relations, hence they succumb to the dominative and exploitative aspects of unlegislated domestic service. The denial of civil-political rights does not necessarily preclude the fact that foreign female domestic workers can be political actors who engage in different forms of resistance that challenge or renegotiate employer-employee relations. James C. Scott warned of the consequences of retaining a narrow conception of political action as organized action that overtly challenges the rule of dominant elites:

So long as we confine our conception of the political to openly declared forms of resistance, then we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essentially lack a political life or that what political life they do have is restricted to those exceptional moments of popular explosion. Unfortunately, to believe so is to miss the immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt and that, for better or worse, is the political environment of subject classes. It is to focus on the visible coastline of politics and miss the continent that lies beyond. ₇

Naomi Abrahams offers a reconceptualization of political action that takes into account the sets of everyday social relations in which occur the construction, exercise, and challenge to power in its material and nonmaterial dimensions.

The activities of daily life provide vast and important dimension to power relation processes in which significant, yet invisible political action occurs. . . . [P]olitical action is defined as a form of human behaviour that involves the negotiation, alteration, or retrenchment of social values and resources [italics mine]. Resources include, but are not limited to money, time, space, prestige, and deference. Values refer to the sets of expectations and beliefs which organize and inform a definition of the situation. ₈

This reformulation of political action transcends the notion that political space and activities are exclusively associated with the formal conduct of governance. Since any set of social relations that involves covert and overt (re)negotiation of power qualifies as political action, then the participants should be considered political actors.

Within the context of everyday life, the household is a political arena. ₉ Especially in the performance and consumption of paid reproductive labor, the values and resources of employers—not domestic workers—dominate the conditions under which wages are exchanged for housework. The many ways in which employers establish their superior or dominant status, together with the domestic workers’ responses, will be informative of the infrapolitics of domestic service in which Filipina and Indonesian servants challenge the unequal distribution and exercise of power in the household.

 

“Love to Hate Them, Hate to Love Them”: The Public Transcript of Domestic Service

The public transcript of domestic service in Malaysia is dominated characteristically by the self-portraits of female as opposed to male employers. In spite of the growing “liberation” of Malaysian women in public space and activities (e.g., increases in the number of women in politics and business), they remain responsible for running the household. ₁₀ Increasingly, middle-class women—whether or not they work beyond the home—are able to transfer the more laborious household tasks to foreign female domestic workers. In this study, only two out of sixty-eight employers were full-time homemakers. The employment of Filipina and Indonesian servants transforms middle-class Malaysian women into household supervisor-managers.

Significantly, the identity construction of the middle-class household supervisor-manager is one of two key self-portraits of female employers. As we will see later, the mass influx of foreign domestic workers in the country, coupled with surveillance of their movement in public space by state authorities, also engender self-portraits of middle-class female employers as domestic spies.

The Middle-Class Household Supervisor-Manager

Studies of women’s relations to global, regional, and national capitalist development show that the expansion of capitalist social relations of production has different effects on the performance of reproductive labor in different social classes. ₁₁ In relative terms, while working-class women confront the double burden of working within and beyond the house, middle-class women in advanced industrialized and industrializing societies are able to employ servants to relieve them of the more labor-intensive aspects of housework. Since a middle-class family generally can afford to hire only one servant, the employment of domestic workers by middle classes all over the world has changed the traditional master-servant relationship that prevails among aristocratic households in which servants at the bottom of the servant hierarchy are supervised by servants at the top who, in turn, answer directly to the master.

Scholars of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century domestic service in the West argue that the mass employment of servants transforms middle-class women into household managers responsible for directing and evaluating the performance of their hired help. Inherent in the supervision of domestic workers are the processes by which occur the construction of middle-class identity. ₁₂ In the United States and Latin America, middle-class female employers have been known to purchase linguistic/verbal, nonverbal, and spatial deference from their servants:

The wife-servant relationship is founded on contradictions, and in order to keep the servant in her place, a host of mechanisms are often utilized to signal class differences. Through speech patterns, voice tone, obligation to wear a uniform, prohibition on eating certain foods, locking her in the house when the wife leaves, locking her out of special cupboards, disapproving of phone calls and visits, and by providing humble and sparsely furnished quarters, the wildly conflicting currents of personal intensity and cold disinterest found in many employing households are kept under control. ₁₃

In postcolonial Malaysia, deference also has become an important aspect of the construction of middle-class identity.

Employer Purchase of Deference. Encouraged by DOMs, Malaysian male and female employers instruct foreign domestic workers to address them respectively as “Sir” and “Mum.” Employers, on the other hand, call their employees by the latter’s first names.

Interviews in Malaysian employers’ homes reveal the extent to which their children learn to use particular words to establish social superiority over servants. As Aishah, a Malay employer insisted, “I want my children to tell the maid what to do, and not have the maid tell my children what to do.” Indeed, young children do “instruct” domestic workers. In one particular interview, while I spoke with a female employer in her living room, her seven-year old daughter told the servant to dig a hole in the garden so that the child could plant her chili seeds. All of a sudden, we heard the servant scream in pain. When we went out to the garden, we saw the young child hitting the servant with a small gardening spade. The child kept saying “Stupid, stupid, stupid. Mommy, look she is so stupid. I told her not to put water there. She didn’t listen to me.” The servant, who was kneeling on the earth, could only use her hands to shield her face against the child’s spade.

During an interview with another female employer, her two sons, who had just returned from soccer practice, sat with us at the dining table and discussed different ways to draw comic book heroes. The older son (twelve years old) asked the servant, who was cooking lunch in the kitchen, to go upstairs to get his coloring pencils. She told him that she would do so as soon as she had finished cooking. He belligerently said, “I want it now. Are you bodoh [stupid]?” The servant stopped what she was doing and went upstairs to get his pencils.

In both instances, the mothers failed to reprimand their children. The foreign domestic workers remained silent. These employers’ behavior reinforces the socialization of their children into a particular kind of middle class-hood which expects women to be responsible for housework and legitimizes the attitude that foreign domestic workers do not deserve to be spoken to or treated with respect. ₁₄

Nonverbal deference in the household is equally distinctive. Filipina and Indonesian servants are instructed by DOMs and certain employers to look down at the ground when they are addressed by their employers; never to maintain eye contact with their employers; and to speak only when employers ask them questions. The more fortunate servants are considered pseudo-kin, or at the very least treated as strangers by the employing families. The less fortunate servants are invisible to employing families until and unless it is time to serve family members. These nonverbal acts are not at all dissimilar from that which Pamela Horn ascertained in the domestic worker class of the Victorian era in Great Britain. ₁₅ Conceivably, Malaysian employers’ expectations of such deference reflect a particular instance in which there appears to be little difference between the postcolonial and colonial mindset. It can be argued that the pursuit of modernity, as far as these employers are concerned, is synonymous with emulating the demeanor and Victorian values of their former colonial masters.

Foreign domestic workers in upper-middle-class Malaysian households have been known to wear uniforms that are patterned after those of European female servants: black dress or blouse and skirt, white aprons, and caps. ₁₆ Paradoxically, uniformed servants in wealthy households may be slightly better off, in some instances, than their counterparts in middle-class households. Since wealthy families are able to employ several servants, no one servant is made to perform all household tasks. Although the uniforms mark Filipina and Indonesian women as “maids,” nonetheless the women retain some notion of their status as human beings (of a lower class than employing family members, to be sure).

Employer purchase of spatial deference can be seen readily in public space and in employers’ homes. Servants who accompany their employers on trips to shopping malls inevitably carry babies and/or bags while their employers freely peruse consumer goods. In country clubs, servants have the thankless responsibility of ensuring that young children abide by the clubs’ swimming regulations while their employers relax with a game of golf, and/or chat with friends by the poolside. ₁₇

Servants’ bedrooms in employers’ homes are located on the ground floor of two story link or row houses. The allocation of living space in which employers occupy the upper floor while migrant women live on the ground-level, is a manifestation of power relations. Servants have little to no privacy: nearly all of the women interviewed said that while they were required to knock before entering any bedroom other than their own, employers failed to reciprocate. The less fortunate are not even allocated bedrooms. Instead, they are made to sleep in storage rooms with no ventilation or even along corridors outside kitchens. When employers’ entertained guests in the home, the domestic workers were expected to remain in the kitchen and emerge only to serve meals.

From my field research, I discerned two additional ways in which employers purchased deference, i.e., by amplifying the faults of other employers, and by giving material gifts. Amplification of other employers’ faults is most apparent when an employer shows her servant newspaper articles on the abuse of foreign domestic workers to reinforce, in the migrant woman, an appreciation for the conceivably decent and humane ways in which she is treated by her employer. In separate interviews conducted with Melina, Latifah, and Suet Ling, the three employers respectively described the way they used such articles:

I cut out that article [on how a servant was punched and slapped by her employer] and told her to read it. I reminded her how lucky she was that we were so nice to her.

I keep the newspapers [on abuse] so that when she doesn’t behave properly I will show it to her.

I gave her the papers and told her, “I treat you well, you should be grateful.”

Whereas an employer’s act of “sharing” newspaper articles with her servant carries an implied threat, the act of giving gifts to a servant appears to be an objectivation of the employer’s sense of gratitude which, at the same time, “euphemizes” her superior economic status. ₁₈ Swee Ping, a middle-class informant insisted that European and Malaysian employers had different motives for giving material gifts to domestic workers. She said to me while we were at an antique store selecting furniture for her friend Grace: “Come on, Christine. We all know why the Europeans do it. Do you really think that they care about their maids? They just want the maids to stay out of their way when they are in the house.” Swee Ping’s remarks implied that although some Malaysians abused their foreign domestic workers, Europeans couched their demeaning superior racial and class attitudes toward servants in material gifts. Grace, having heard Swee Ping’s argument, quickly tried to explain why her husband Bill, a British expatriate, wanted her to buy presents for the Filipina servant. She said, “Bill tells me to get her whatever she wants so that she can be ‘out of our hair.’ It is difficult, you know-lah, having a stranger in the house. There is no privacy. She knows everything about us.”

A brief discussion of an aspect of the hidden transcript (i.e., what domestic workers say and do in the absence of their employers) will help to illustrate how receiving gifts from employers allow Filipinas to rank their employers according to race. Over the course of an informal group discussion in a Kuala Lumpur shopping mall, several Filipina servants debated the virtues and vices of their employers. A group of servants who worked for European expatriates argued that their employers were better than Malaysians because Europeans provided their servants not only with clean and well-ventilated bedrooms (some servants even boasted of having air-conditioners in their rooms), but also television sets and videocassette players:

Catherine:		I hope you don’t mind because I have to tell you, Christine. Chinese employers are very stingy. Please don’t be offended because you are Chinese, but you are different from them [employers].
Louisa:		Why do you talk like that? She cannot be like them. [Louisa parodies her female employer in the manner in which her employer tries to apply eyeliner while conversing in a high squeaky voice to her husband]
Catherine:		The Chinese, they are very stingy. They never give enough food to eat, always complain. . . . [Y]ou can’t do this, you can’t do that.
Louisa:		All employers are good and bad. Do you think Europeans are better?
Catherine:		Of course, my employer [British] gives me air-con [air-conditioning unit in the bedroom], TV, and today she says she’s going to buy a VCR so that I can watch videotapes.
Angelina:		Yes, my employer [Australian] rents videotapes for me to watch at night.
Louisa:		Think! Why she buy you all these things? Use your brain! She tells you not to come out of your room unless she calls you, am I right?
Catherine:		[nods her head]
Louisa:		You see, not all employers are good. Some Europeans are also bad. They want us to stay in the room, so they buy us TV. My former employer was British. OK, they buy for me, I accept!

Louisa chided Angelina and Catherine for failing to understand the reasons underlying the largess of some European employers. From Louisa’s point of view, the gifts were acceptable so long as Filipinas acknowledged that the purchase of privacy was a key motive of European employers.

Malaysian employers in this study who gave gifts to foreign domestic workers did so simultaneously to express their gratitude and to purchase obligation. I was present when Emily, a Chinese employer, gave her Indonesian servant a 22-karat gold chain, a roundtrip ticket to Indonesia for two weeks, and new clothes in celebration of the 1994 Chinese New Year. The domestic worker was visibly ecstatic when she received the gifts. After the servant left the room, Emily looked at me and said, “The way to keep them in line is to make them obligated. I give her presents, she works hard for me.” ₁₉

Receiving gifts obligates the domestic worker to her employer, and subsequently increases the employer’s expectation of a particular kind of reciprocity. If and when a servant fails to fulfill the other half of this unwritten social contract, the employer may experience feelings of anger and/or betrayal. Jane, whose first foreign domestic worker suddenly decided to quit, described her response:

Unlike my other friends, I refused to deduct from her salary. Rita worked for two years and kept to herself. She never had the bad habits of the others, like going out late at night, talking on the telephone, having visitors. My sons were attached to her but she was always so detached. It seemed like she didn’t want to get too close to them. And now, I understand why. Two weeks before she left, she started to act strange. She finally said that she wanted to work for herself, open a hawker’s stall. I felt so betrayed. I was always good to her. I bought her clothes, gave her days off. I took her everywhere. All she had to do was to pay for her own toiletries. She knew everything about my life and lifestyle. She knew all of my friends. She knew my schedule. She remembered what I liked and didn’t. When she left, I felt angry and betrayed—all mixed up feelings. I treated her like she was my younger sister.

Jane expected Rita to reciprocate her kindness by staying with the family rather than leaving Jane to start her own business. At the very least, Jane expected Rita to have been more forthcoming with her decision to leave the household.

Implicit in the different ways employers purchased deference and obligation is the establishment of social distance and status between employers and foreign servants. There also are other ways in which middle-class identity is constructed.

Civilized Employers Versus Backward Maids. Key studies of domestic service in the West, particularly in the United States, demonstrate that the history of slavery, industrialization, and concomitant changes in immigration patterns have allowed white female employers to purchase status from African-American, Japanese, Chicana, and Caribbean female servants. ₂₀ Upper and/or middle-class identity construction of white employers as more educated and presumably more civilized occurs in juxtaposition to that of nonwhite working-class women of color as backward servants. ₂₁

In postcolonial Malaysia employer-domestic servant relations are somewhat more complex. On the surface, a central issue does not appear to be the different ethnic backgrounds of employers and employees. One legacy of precolonial and colonial migration and settlement throughout Southeast Asia is that contemporary Malays are the ethnic cousins of many Indonesians and Filipinas, and the same can be said (to a lesser extent) of the relationship between some Chinese and Filipinas. ₂₂

Rather, it is the specific nationality of the servant and concomitant ascribed traits, which help facilitate employer construction of social status. Paradoxically, the employment of a servant from either the Philippines or Indonesia has the potential to resurrect and reaffirm what the British constructed in colonial Malaya, i.e., Malays : Chinese = poor : rich = low : high social status.

In the particular group of middle-class employers with whom I spoke, I find that there is an emerging distinction between those who hired Filipinas and those who hired Indonesian women. Malaysian employers (much like European employers’ perceptions of “Hylam Boys” and “Klings” during the colonial period) perceived Indonesian women as less educated and less hygienic than Filipinas. In short, Indonesian women were unceremoniously given the title of “backward” maids. Below are some of the justificatory statements from employers who hired Filipina rather than Indonesian servants.

No Indonesians! They give you the idea that they are always going to run away. No doubt they are cheaper, but you hear so many stories of them stealing things . . . a lot of stories. It is not worth it [to employ Indonesian domestic workers]. Better to know the devil than not to know what it’s all about.

Indonesians are dirty, they steal. Filipinos are arrogant but they are better than Indonesians.

Indonesians can’t be trusted and they are so dirty.

They [Filipinas] can speak English and help my children with their homework.

Filipinos are better educated and know how to behave properly.

I prefer a Filipino [sic] girl even though Filipinos are fussy because they are educated. The white people have spoilt them.

Those who get Indonesians are damn stupid because they [Indonesians] are so lazy and dumb.

Very simple. One word. Hygiene. Filipinos are more hygienic.

Employers’ belief that Indonesian servants are less modern, or conversely more backward than Filipinas is fueled by the fact that Filipinas have higher levels of education and are paid higher monthly salaries than their Indonesian counterparts. Most Filipina servants I encountered had attained at least a secondary school level education, while Indonesian servants, who came mainly from rural areas, had received at best a primary school level education.

Many rural Indonesian women’s unfamiliarity with performing modern housework reinforces employers’ negative perceptions of this group of foreign servants. The mutual desire of employers and DOMs to find young and inexperienced domestic servants has led to the increasing selection and in-migration of Indonesian women from the remotest villages wherein some women were barely exposed to modern utilities, let alone a modern lifestyle, prior to migration. From a DOM’s perspective, the younger and less experienced the servant, the less likely she is to run away from her employer and in the process cause financial and legal problems for the DOM. From the perspective of some Malaysian employers, the younger and less experienced the domestic worker, the more likely she is expected to accept her subordination in the workplace.

While the in-migration of rural Indonesian women may solve employer demands for docile servants, women who neither are exposed to modern housework prior to migration nor formally trained to perform modern housework can cause different types of problems for employers. Meena, an Indian employer who hired her first Indonesian servant six years ago, described her experience:

I went to a flat to get her. I was horrified. The stench and the dirt. Must have been at least 20 men and women in the one bedroom flat. They had just arrived by boat. E was a “kebun [farm] worker” in Indonesia. She knew absolutely next to nothing about housework. She had never been in a car. When we drove her back [to the house], she puked all over the back seat. Then she was shocked at the size of her bedroom. To make matters worse, she didn’t know how to switch on the light. I came back and saw her sitting in the dark. Oh, and then the phone. When it rang, you should have seen her face the second she heard a human voice at the other end! She also didn’t know how to use the taps on the sink. That night, we had to go out to a dinner function. . . . I had no choice but to put food in her room and lock her inside until we came back. . . . Christine, she didn’t even know how to use the toilet. She’d do her business by squatting on the floor with the door open. I had to say something to her, you know, because of my two boys. Can you imagine? Headache, only.

Meena reasoned that locking the Indonesian woman in the bedroom that night was the only way to prevent unforeseen problems that could and did arise from hiring foreign domestic workers who had had no prior experience living and working in modern middle-class households.

Indonesian women who had not been trained to perform modern housework posed potential threats to themselves and the employing families. Rose, a Chinese employer, was animated in her narrative on the “backwardness” of her first foreign servant, an Indonesian woman:

She was so stupid. Aduh! She nearly killed us. I asked her if she knew how to use the gas stove, and she said yes. She switched on the gas, and then went to do something else. I don’t know how long the gas was on before she came into my room and asked me to follow her into the kitchen. She held a matchbox and started striking a match while she asked me if this was the way to light the stove! I tell you, no more of this-ah! One morning, I walked into the kitchen and the whole place was like a sauna. Guess what I saw? One egg bobbing in the kuali [wok] . . . she was boiling one egg in a kuali-full of water! Give me a Filipino girl anytime.

Some employers can and do perpetuate a self-reinforcing cycle of frustration in that while they demand trainable servants, they also expect servants to know how to perform modern urban housework without additional instruction. As a result, the choice of a Filipina over an Indonesian woman not only symbolizes an employer’s refusal to devote time and effort to “modernize” the foreign servant, but subsequently elevates the employer’s social status in relation to other members of the larger group of Malaysian employers.

In this study, the majority of Malaysian employers of Filipina domestic workers were non-Malays: 26 out of 36 Chinese employers, 7 out of 13 Indian employers, 3 out of 3 employers of mixed descent (two were of Chinese-Indian descent and one was of Malay-Indian descent), and 3 out of 16 Malay employers. The sample size of 68 employers does not allow for a more definitive statement here with respect to whether Indonesians were and/or are employed mostly by Malays in Malaysia.

Non-Malay employers of Filipina servants in this study believed that Malays hired Indonesian servants because of cultural, religious, and linguistic similarities, and that Indonesian women’s salaries were lower than that of Filipina servants. All sixteen Malay employers agreed with the first reason. According to Aishah, “In Muslim households, Indonesian maids are usually preferred because of similarities in our cultures.”

The Malay employers, however, objected to the second reason, which implied that they could not afford to pay the higher salaries of Filipina servants. Some Malays who employed Indonesian domestic workers did so to prevent real or perceived criticisms from the Malay community. They reasoned that if they were unencumbered by the expectations of kinfolk and/or state authorities, they would hire Filipina servants instead. For example, Latifah said that “A lot of my friends in the civil service pick Indonesians because of religion . . . to save others from criticizing them. It’s not so much the cost.” Khatijah explained that she employed an Indonesian as opposed to a Filipina domestic worker because of her mother-in-law’s objection to a Christian servant in the household: “I got an Indonesian maid only because of my mother-in-law. I didn’t want to hear her harass me because the maid eats [pork]. Given a choice, I’d prefer a Filipina girl. Indonesians always say that they have to balik kampung [go back to their villages] or wherever they go on their day off, and who knows what they do.”

Out of the group of sixteen Malay employers, the three who hired Filipina servants assured me that there were no explicit or implicit barriers to Malay employment of Filipinas. Yasmine, one of the three Malay employers, insisted that she and other Malay employers chose Filipina servants because the women were more hardworking and they also were of great help in tutoring Malay children to read and write English.

Implicit in non-Malay and Malay employment of Filipina servants in this study is the understanding that employers were willing and able to pay higher wages for more “civilized” foreign domestic workers. Whereas the majority of Malay employers in this study preferred or felt that they had to employ Indonesian women because of cultural, religious, and linguistic considerations, Latifah and Khatijah’s comments suggested that some would disassociate themselves from the community of lower status employers of Indonesian servants so long as the act of employing Filipinas did not result in familial or social sanctions.

In this study, the majority of non-Malays employed Filipinas. Given the hierarchical ranking of foreign servants, there is the unstated assumption among employers that “less wealthy” Malaysians can only employ Indonesian servants. Included in this group of less wealthy employers are Malays. Paradoxically, the state’s earlier insistence that only Malays could employ Indonesian-Muslim servants encourages the perception that middle-class Malays are less well off than the non-Malay middle classes. Further research has the potential to ascertain, in greater depth and with more clarity, the ways in which specific intersections of nationality-religion-ethnicity-class-gender in Malaysian employment of foreign domestic workers shape emerging middle-class subjectivity and intersubjectivity.

Employers’ ranking of domestic workers according to nationality has affected how Filipina servants perceive their Indonesian peers. Although the example I am about to cite is more appropriate for the section on “hidden transcripts,” I have elected to include it in the discussion of the public transcript in order to illustrate the extent to which some foreign female domestic workers, in the absence of their employers, can strengthen certain aspects of the public transcript.

A group of Filipina servants in a church reinforced their employers’ social status (and, by extension, their own status within the larger group of foreign domestic workers) when they asked me to tell them what nationality of servant I would choose, if and when I decided to employ a domestic worker. When I appeared noncommittal, they said:

Salbi:		Please don’t get an Indonesian maid because they are not skilled. They don’t know how to clean the house and they also steal. We are better.
Esther:		Indonesians are very lazy and dirty. They never wash things properly. Also, they are not good at cooking.
Lani:		You want to employ an Indonesian girl? What can she do? They are very stupid, do you know?

It is important to emphasize that none of the Filipina servants above had spoken to or worked with Indonesian servants. Rather, their impressions of Indonesian servants were formed largely from newspaper articles and conversations with their employers. By arguing that they were more capable than Indonesian women in performing housework, the Filipina servants affirmed the rank order of foreign domestic workers that had been constructed by their employers.

Given Filipina servants’ desire to distance themselves from Indonesian women’s constructed identity as lazy, ignorant, and criminally oriented servants, the possibility of solidarity between the two groups of women may be contingent on Filipinas’ ability to challenge the public transcript that has created hierarchical categories of servants according to nationality. Even so, Filipina and Indonesian servants first must be able to overcome the language barrier that divides them since Filipinas are proficient in English while most Indonesian women arrive in Malaysia speaking Bahasa Melayu (Malay language) and/or different Indonesian dialects. The hierarchical ranking of servants; the socially isolated occupation of domestic service; and linguistic differences among foreign domestic workers assure state authorities, DOMs, and employers that Filipina and Indonesian women cannot readily organize to demand their rights.

Thus far, it can be said that the public transcript of domestic service offers a relatively benign picture of employer-servant relations. However, in their efforts to reinforce social and economic superiority, middle-class employer-supervisors resort to more negative methods of supervision and control that are perpetuated by the absence of labor legislation.

Dehumanizing the Hired Help. In individual interviews, Suet Ling, Susan, and Janet respectively explained why they would verbally reprimand their servants:

You have to scold her even if she does things right, just to remind her who is boss . . . so that she doesn’t get the wrong idea that she can step all over us.

I don’t like it but I have to scold her now and again. I know that she pretends not to hear, so I shout louder.

You are like a manager, reward when they do well, punish when they fuck up. You know, like that experiment, what is the name, Pavlov?

Verbal reprimands function not only to correct servants’ mistakes, but also to reinforce employers’ higher social status. Scolding episodes transform into physical assault when servants inadvertently fail to meet, or even at times purposely reject their employers’ expectations of particular behavioral and attitudinal postures (see section on hidden transcript). I was told by Filipina and Indonesian servants who had worked in Malaysia for a year or more that women with barely a few months of work experience in Malaysia would respond with tears to employers’ physical assaults. A Filipina servant said that she would “go back to my room and cry,” whenever her face was forcefully graced by her female employer’s palm.

In some cases, employers went so far as to make the final decision on when a servant was allowed to retire for the night. One evening, while I was visiting her family, Sally asked her servant to bathe her young children. As Sally and I talked, I saw the domestic worker walk up and down the stairs several times, catering to the children’s demands. Sally’s husband, who was watching television, said to the servant, “I’m calling you now, come down at once.” He asked her, “Hey, my daughter is sick, where’s the medicine?” The domestic worker replied, “Sir, she already ate the pill.” As the servant turned to walk away, he looked at me and said loudly, “They give you headaches. Some of them are so stupid!” Later that evening, the couple invited me out to dinner. While we were at a neighborhood coffee shop, I reminded them that the domestic worker had not had any dinner, and suggested that the couple buy food for her. Both the husband and wife fell silent. When we went back to their house, the husband said to the servant who was standing quietly outside her bedroom, “You can go to sleep now.”

The couple’s refusal to buy dinner for the domestic worker reflects a key contradiction in contemporary live-in domestic service in Malaysia. Employing families expect to be served at all times of the day, but they resent having to provide servants with board and lodging, in addition to wages. Consequently, some employers resort to a daily meticulous inventory of food in the refrigerator, much like how May Lan and Sandy responded to servants who ate food from the refrigerator (see chapter 4). Yet, no employer in this study even considered hiring day or part-time workers, partly because of the latter’s work schedules.

Employer complaints ranged from migrant women who consumed too much food at employer’s expense, to the length of time taken in performing household tasks. On separate occasions, three employers Sharifah, Susan, and Vivien, respectively had the following to say about their employees:

Oh my goodness, she is so lazy. She takes how many hours to clean the first floor, you won’t believe.

Of course she [domestic worker is Indonesian-Muslim] can pray. But I tell her, “Remember, sembahyang [pray] on your own time.” I cannot afford to let her pray on my hardearned money. I tell you, they [servants] are too much sometimes.

This batch of Filipina maids is not like the pioneer batch [in the mid to late 1980s] because they want to bathe with hot water, good taste in clothes, cannot sleep without mattress, cannot walk in the house without slippers. She asked me to get her slippers so that she could wear them in the house. I asked her what was wrong with her feet. She stopped asking for slippers.

Narratives that construct migrant women as inherently lazy and/or demanding simultaneously represent employers as hardworking and reasonable. Implicit in the narratives are employers’ justification for making servants work longer hours, pay for their own food, and so forth.

The Malaysian state’s refusal to legislate domestic service has the effect of transferring the responsibility of determining work relations and boundaries to employers and foreign domestic workers. The task of delineating the conditions in which labor is exchanged for wages at best is extremely difficult since Filipina and Indonesian women not only work in their employers’ houses, but are also required legally to reside with their employers. The work environment then is dominated by the wage-paying party. The material and symbolic aspects of the public transcript of domestic service reveal how middle-class identity is constructed in the domestic domain, and implicitly, employers’ conceptualizations of what is not just or fair in the exchange of wages for labor.

Today, the abusive aspects of employer-domestic worker relations are exacerbated by the consequences of the state’s policy of circumscribing the activities of Filipina and Indonesian servants in public space.

Female Employers as Domestic Spies

While state agencies such as the Police and Immigration Departments, together with newspaper reporters conduct surveillance of foreign servants beyond employers’ homes, the surveillance of servants in the domestic domain largely remains the responsibility of female employer-supervisors. The state deftly enlists middle-class female employers as spies in the domestic realm via measures that are implemented by the Immigration Department.

The Immigration Department will confiscate DOMs and employers’ deposits of bond money (required by law) if foreign domestic workers are detained by the police for criminal activities, or if the women run away from their workplace. In addition, the annual levy of RM360 paid by an employer or a servant will be forfeited should either party decide to terminate the work contract early. ₂₃ The Immigration Department explains the official rationale for these punitive measures: “We want to discourage maids from running away from employers or employers dismissing maids at their whim.” ₂₄ These measures introduced to curb illegal activities of foreign servants, and employer abuse, have had negative repercussions on migrant women’s lives instead.

A key consequence is that foreign servants either continue to suffer abuse or risk deportation by running away from abusive employers. Nevertheless, in my conversations with Malaysian employers, taxi drivers, grocers in farmers’ markets and retail shop owners, it is believed that Filipina and Indonesian servants run away to become prostitutes in order to earn more money.

The press has played a major role in shaping negative public perceptions of foreign domestic workers by printing sensationalized articles of police arrests and, in the process, identifying certain public places as sites of prostitution involving Filipina and/or Indonesian women. As Azizah Kassim writes in the case of Indonesian migrant workers, “The local population has had limited or non-interactions with the Indonesians, and thus press coverage of the Indonesian immigrant issue was seminal in setting the tone of public opinion and shaping individual responses and reactions to the Indonesians.” ₂₅

Newspaper articles help constitute what are called the “sexploits” of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. Sexploits are transmitted via employers’ social networks, in person, or on the telephone. ₂₆ Repeatedly over the course of field research, informal discussions by employers and their friends in homes, restaurants, country clubs, and so forth, would center on sexploits. In employers’ houses, sexploits were discussed openly by Malaysians in the presence of the employer-host’s servant as if she either did not exist or could not understand the conversation. ₂₇

During a dinner party in the home of a middle-class informant, a group of three middle-class employers swapped sexploits while the host’s foreign servant walked back and forth from the kitchen carrying plates of food.

Lily:		Yoke Fong has a maid from the Philippines. She hired her to take care of the house and the children. And, she would tell us how good the maid was—the girl changed her [Yoke Fong’s] sheets in the master bedroom everyday! Imagine sleeping on fresh sheets every night! One day, Yoke Fong went to work without her briefcase and so she drove home to get it. She went to her bedroom and found the maid in bed with a stranger. The girl used her house as “sex for service!”
Yasmine:		Oh yes, and do you know the story of this woman who found her maid in bed with her husband? God, she fired the maid on the spot. Aduh, you know what the maid said to her? “I slept with your son too!”
Janet:		You see, how can you trust them, ah? Even though they are good, you’d never really know. Like my maid, when she first came, she cried for six weeks non-stop! I’m not joking-lah! I swear! I asked her what was wrong and she said that she was homesick . . . missed her children or something like that. How the hell would I know if she’s lying or not?

A key moral in these tales of sexploits is that foreign domestic workers, even those who appear to diligently perform domestic labor, cannot be trusted.

At another female employer’s house, her husband Greg described to his guests what had happened to a colleague from his workplace:

Hey, my friend from work came home one day and found the house completely dark [wife and children were in London]. The maid left a note on the table to say that she couldn’t take it anymore. Then his next maid, oh boy, she was weird. For a while they kept hearing the front door open and close in the middle of the night. Then one night, he decided to go downstairs and investigate the strange noise. He saw her [servant] at the door, smiling at him. He turned around and saw a pair of men’s black shoes underneath the living room drapes. He pulled the drapes back and found a man hiding behind the curtains!

The issue of foreign domestic workers’ (alleged) sexual misconduct was accepted by fellow discussants, Melina and Sandy, as key reasons for employers’ need to be more restrictive of the servants’ movement and association with peoples beyond the domestic domain.

Melina:		What to do? You want to be nice and if you are, they climb all over your head. If you are strict, then they say you are bad. Christine, write this down. I want you to write this down: “You love to hate them [foreign female domestic workers] and you hate to love them.” This is how we feel about them. Have you written it down? Good . . . we are not monsters. Eh, remember, don’t use my real name. Promise me ah, you know what I mean?
Sandy :		[nodded her head in agreement] I tell my friends, don’t give the maid too much freedom and face. If they do, then habis-lah [lit: “finished/gone”]. We should not grovel. Oh, and don’t be too friendly. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Melina’s phrase, “love to hate them, hate to love them,” neatly captures employers’ sense of distrust in dealing with foreign domestic workers.

Sexploits that were discussed by employers and their friends did not usually refer to the behavior of the conversants’ employees. Rather, the servant in question always worked for an employer’s friend, or a friend’s friend. To be sure, sensationalized newsprint articles contribute to the potency of the stories. Regardless of the degree of truth, sexploits were perceived by conversants as real events that occurred in the lives of their friends or fellow Malaysians. Sexploits heighten employers’ fear over the possibility of foreign servants contracting sexually transmitted diseases and, in turn, infecting members of the household.

A subtext of most, if not all the stories, is a potential threat: foreign domestic workers might engage in sexual relations with female employers’ husbands. For example, when Rosa mentioned to her female employer that her male employer was looking at her in a “strange” manner, she was instructed to keep out of his way: “I told mum about it. She told me to stay in my room or the kitchen if she was not home. I cannot go to the living room to clean when he is the only one at home.” Lin, an Indonesian domestic worker whose male employer consistently reminded his wife to treat her with more respect, said “Mum is jealous because when she scolds me, sir always sides with me. Sometimes when she goes overseas, he takes me shopping and buys me nice things [e.g., clothes, accessories].” Significantly, Lin’s statement identifies the female employer as the more abusive party.

The interests of female employers and state authorities converge with respect to the presence of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysian society. Middle-class employers’ individual and collective fear over the perceived sexual and criminal tendencies of all foreign servants, and the potentially punitive legal consequences, have become a key rationale for severely curtailing Filipina and Indonesian the servants’ ability to interact with peoples beyond the workplace. In an interview at her home, Maimunah repeated the advice that she gave to her friends who also employed foreign servants: “The way to keep her in line is not to let her out of the house, always keep her in sight. Don’t let her use the phone. Really, never let her out unless you have to.”

The “disease” metaphor was prevalent in many employers’ rationale for denying their servants access to the world beyond the four walls of the home: “Don’t let them be contaminated. Don’t let them out to learn bad habits from outsiders”; “less getting together, less trouble”; “I don’t want my girl getting bad ideas from other people”; and “I drive her to church and wait for her. I want to see that she doesn’t mix with bad company.” In the first few weeks of my field research, I quickly discovered that some employers were not enthusiastic, to say the least, about allowing me to speak with their servants. One irate employer said to me: “What you need to know about my maid, I will tell you. I don’t want her talking to other people. You read the papers . . . so many stories about how they are prostitutes and criminals.”

Employers’ surveillance of domestic workers extends to monitoring phones and relying on their children and their neighbors to assume the role of substitute spies. During an interview in Khatijah’s office, Janet and Khatijah shared with me their strategies for checking on the servants. Khatijah taught her eleven year-old son to report on the behavior of the servant in her absence (“My son told me the other day that she was on the phone for hours”), while Janet telephoned her house intermittently during the work day to ascertain if the domestic worker was busy performing housework or merely chatting with a compatriot over the telephone (“I will call back to my house to see if the line is busy and for how long.”) An Indian employer, Prithiva, depended on her close relationship with an elderly neighbor who would visit her house several times during the day just to ensure that the foreign servant did not use the telephone or entertain guests.

At a church in Kuala Lumpur, I was privy to a conversation between two Filipina servants that confirmed a neighbor’s role:

Patricia:		Sometimes there is not enough food to eat [in the house].
Elba:		If you are hungry, go outside and buy food. How can you work if you are hungry?
Patricia:		I am scared that the neighbors will see me and tell her [female employer] that I went out of the house.

Here, the strategy of delegating neighbors as spies is functionally abusive since Filipina and/or Indonesian servants who, out of hunger, leave the workplace to buy food will risk punishment.

In the above cases, employers’ intent is to protect foreign domestic workers from outside criminal influences. However, the methods of surveillance and control prevent servants from learning their contractual rights to a certain number of rest days and wage levels. Rose, who sat in her office at a state agency as we spoke admitted that, “Yes, I pakat [plot] with my friends. I don’t tell my maid how much others are getting paid because she’ll only ask for more.” Melina, in a flash of introspection, empathized with domestic workers by saying to her friends and me that, “You know-lah, the servant mentality—forever asking but always forgetting to return the favor. Just like us when we work. We ask for better hours, benefits, raises, but we don’t want to give in return.”

Taken as a whole, employer purchase of status/deference/obligation coupled with other methods of control and surveillance constitute middle-class women as modern, clean, trustworthy, and hardworking, while Filipina and Indonesian servants are constructed as more or less backward, dirty, untrustworthy, and lazy. Some scholars argue that domestic service, especially in the West, is an institution that facilitates the modernization of rural/Third World women or women of color. ₂₈ This view is expressed by Janet, who believed that, “If I don’t do anything else, let the satisfaction be mine that I helped to uplift the life of another woman. Why some women are so backward, it’s not through any fault of theirs or mine.”

However, Malaysian women such as Emily, Meena, and to a lesser extent, Janet, are exceptions in a group of employers whose relationships with Filipina and Indonesian servants were characterized mainly by the perceived need to find better or more effective modes of control. For example, Vivien said that, “I teach my maid to better herself. . . . I don’t want her to stay a maid forever.” Yet, she would refuse her servant’s request for house slippers in which to work, a mattress on which to sleep, and so forth.

The growing trend of employing Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia tells us more about how middle-class employers and their children, rather than migrant women, are socialized into the modern urban middle-class lifestyle. Within the context of unlegislated employer-domestic worker relations, and the manner in which Filipina and Indonesian servants are treated and portrayed by state authorities and the press, the public transcript of domestic service reveals and encourages a troubling trend of employer-related emotional, physical, and at times, sexual abuse of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.

Every employer in this study argued that she did not abuse her servant. Abuse was defined in terms of rape and extreme physical assault (e.g., punching or kicking the servant). Many employers’ refusal to provide rest days, adequate sleeping accommodations, structured work hours, and so forth, was justified instead from the perspective of protecting their servants from criminal influences, or that servants were lazy and stupid. Every employer believed that she had been “taken advantage of” at one point or another by domestic workers.

Employers who insisted on monitoring and circumscribing servants’ behavior and activities, then had to take the time and effort, for example, to check the refrigerator; drive Filipina servants to and from Sunday church services; reprimand for the sake of reinforcing the idea of “who’s the boss”; and telephone home whenever they leave their houses for more than a few minutes. To be sure, the negative aspects of employers’ relationships with Filipina and Indonesian servants dehumanize not only the oppressed/servant, but also the oppressor/employer. Of importance to note is that the oppressor in most instances is identifiably the female as opposed to the male employer.

As discerned, the public transcript of domestic service mainly tells the story of the processes in which female employers construct and impose social and economic superiority over foreign domestic workers. In this version of domestic service, Filipina and Indonesian women seemingly acquiesce to work conditions and environments that denigrate their labor and persons. Nonetheless, the women may and do resist middle-class construction of their identity as lazy, stupid, dirty, and/or sex-hungry servants—ascribed traits that are considered undeserving of humane treatment: “[Subordinates] obey and conform not because they have internalized the norms of the domestic servant but because a structure of surveillance, reward, and punishment makes it prudent for them to comply.” ₂₉ The record of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ responses can be found in what is called the “hidden transcript.”

 

Hidden Transcript of Domestic Service

In metaphorical terms, the public transcript of domestic service is a theatrical performance that is produced and directed by employers (aided indirectly by state authorities). Backstage, “beyond the direct observation by powerholders,” is a hidden transcript, in which can be found the different ways that Filipina and Indonesian servants reject the social codes

of conduct or parameters established by their employers and even the Malaysian public. ₃₀

Identifying and examining the hidden transcript involved mostly offstage conversations with domestic workers at “informal assemblages” such as churches, shopping malls, and discotheques. ₃₁ Many employers’ refusal to give servants rest days, then, is due partly to their fear of servants coming together to exchange stories of employers’ lifestyles, contractual rights, and alternative ways to generate income (e.g., selling their bodies or setting up illegal food/hawker stalls). ₃₂ Indeed, at the informal gathering places, Filipina and Indonesian servants shared with their friends information on a variety of topics ranging from ways to cope with abusive employers and gossip about employing families, to identifying retail shops with the latest fashion items on sale.

Slaves in the Household

The slave (hamba) metaphor dominated Filipina and Indonesian women’s narratives on the many ways in which they were treated by their employers. Late one morning after a Sunday church service, a group of six Filipina servants who saw me talking with a Filipina informant eagerly joined our conversation about their working conditions.

Felicitas:		We are human. We have the same kind of heart and body, why do they treat us like we are not human?
Auntie [Felicitas’ aunt]:		I swallow only because of money. If you have a brain, you must know that you have a human right to fight. She cannot pay me RM500 and then treat me like a slave.
Lourdes:		They get my blood, you know, for the medical exam [she demonstrates with her fingers the many “inches” of blood that were taken from her]. When you take my blood, how can you treat me like a slave?
Maria Rosa:		See, they don’t think we are human. We are like slaves to them. They take our sweat but they don’t give us respect.
Ruth:		Chinese employers are very bad. Big house, big car, big wallet, but they give us nothing. Only want to use us like we are slaves.
Pilar:		Do I look like a slave? Please tell me why Malaysians treat us so badly?

At a farmer’s market, Subaidah complained to her friend, Kak Tin, about the way she was treated by her employer.

Subaidah:		I wake up at 5 a.m. and work sometimes until 1 a.m. No time to rest at all. She [employer] scolds me when I sit down. She scolds me when I cannot quickly finish my work. How can I do it if the children always tell me to get this and get that? I only eat rice with gravy, and I am always hungry. I am like a slave [she starts crying].
Kak Tin:		No, no. You are like garbage [sampah], worse than a slave! [Subaidah wipes her eyes and then laughs. The two women go onto plan Subaidah’s “escape” from her employer]

Foreign domestic workers’ rejection of the degree of dehumanization that inheres in the exchange of wages for housework in Malaysia is captured in the frequent use of the slave metaphor. As Judith Rollins writes in the context of domestic service in Boston:

This knowledge of their [servants’] powerlessness as a group combines with their inability to express their outrage to those who have caused it, form the basis of the deep and pervasive ressentiment in the women I interviewed. The presence of such ressentiment attests to domestics’ lack of belief in their own inferiority, their sense of injustice about their treatment and position, and their rejection of the legitimacy of their subordination. ₃₃

Filipina and Indonesian servants in this study, however, expressed their outrage in distinct, and at times culturally specific ways. It is via their narratives that we come to understand how they perceive their subordination, and why they respond as they do.

Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow

To reiterate, Filipina and Indonesian women alike who had worked in Malaysia for only a few months tended to cry in response to situations in which they either were denied food, rest, or were verbally abused (and/or physically assaulted) by their employers. Juanita, a Filipina who had worked merely four months as a servant, said to me while she watched over her employer’s children in a neighborhood playground: “I didn’t pay attention when I was ironing because the baby was crying so loud. Sir scolded me because I made a hole in his shirt [she uses her hands to show the width of the iron-burn]. But mum was worse. She wouldn’t stop calling me stupid, and she said that she would deduct from my salary. I went back to my room and cried.”

Similar to the previous point made by the Indonesian domestic worker Lin, Juanita’s statement also reveals that female employers are more abusive than male employers. Men become, by default, the lesser evil of employers since women unequivocally are assigned the responsibility for supervising foreign domestic workers.

The responses of Indonesian servants with Malay employers were particularly interesting. They expected Malay employers to treat them like family members since many Malays may be and are the ethnoreligious cousins of Indonesians. Put differently, Indonesian servants’ references to parental or kin bonds emerged only in narratives of Malay employers’ actions toward them. This phenomenon conforms to the findings of Jean Taylor and Kathy Robinson’s respective studies of domestic service in Indonesia. Taylor and Robinson argue that paid reproductive labor mostly is perceived by employers and domestic workers through the schemata of kin relations rather than work relations. ₃₄

In the case of Indonesian servants with Malay employers, the former framed their narratives in familial terms because of ethnoreligious proximity to Malays. The narratives reflected the women’s horror upon realizing that shared ethnoreligious heritage between Malays and Indonesians did not prevent mistreatment and abuse at the hands of Malay employers. Ibu Nin, an older Indonesian woman who had run away recently from her physically abusive Malay employers, cried as she said that, “We [Malays and Indonesians] are one nation/race [bangsa] of peoples. I never thought that they’d mistreat me the way they did. Yes, the Chinese are bad, but not as bad [as the Malays].” One day, in her female employer’s absence, Lijah climbed over the metal fence at the back of the house and told me as I was standing in the alley what she said to her employer after she had been reprimanded with harsh words: “Why do you treat me this way? I am also human. You are high [tinggi], and I am low [rendah]. From young until now, my own parents don’t scold me this way. Why do you do this to me? I work very hard for you.”

Susanti, who was introduced to me by a baker at a farmers’ market, narrated her experience in a similar manner. She described what happened one day when she went grocery shopping with her female employer.

My employer, daughter of a Datuk too, scolded me outside the supermarket. . . . [Datuk (similar to the British version of “Sir”) is an honorary title that is awarded by the Agung (king) or Sultan to Malaysians for exemplary service to the country, e.g., Datuk Michael Chan or Datuk Ali Shafie.] She used bad words like “bastard,” “stupid dumb-dumb,” “puki mak” [to have sexual intercourse with her mother], “chicken backside.” She didn’t think I knew some of the English words. I told her to watch her mouth in public but she got angrier. I was ashamed [malu] since it took place in public. She is not well brought up by her parents. No manners.

Nursiah, whom I interviewed while we walked back to her employer’s house, was extremely insulted after her employer’s son degraded her by performing an obscene act with his fingers. She said, “I do not believe how ill-mannered Malays are. My own mother would have slapped me if I did that. She [employer] didn’t say anything to him.” Nursiah’s friend Sri, proceeded to describe an incident in which her Malay employer, in a fit of anger over the way Sri washed certain clothes, told Sri that she hoped Sri would be sexually assaulted by men. Sri responded to her employer’s words in the following way: “I told my employer, ‘You have father, I have father. You have mother, I have mother. You have two hands and feet, I have two hands and feet. Why do you speak to me like this? Am I not human? I am mother’s and father’s daughter.”

Filipina servants, on the other hand, approached domestic service specifically from the perspective of contractual work. Eva, a Filipina servant who sold miscellaneous consumer goods (such as Philippine magazines, soap, and candy, that were imported by a DOM representative without the knowledge of the DOM’s owner) to her compatriots at church, stated that “We have contracts. We show the employer the contracts. They cannot do anything to us. We will tell the embassy. We can read. We know the law.” This small measure of potential protection that the embassy could offer was criticized greatly by a fellow servant Lita, who replied, “The embassy? They cannot do anything. They don’t care. You go now and see what they’ll do for you? Nothing! If I have a problem, I won’t go there.” When I asked Lita what she would do instead, she replied, “Hah, so many things. You want to know? What are you studying? To be a professor? Then you must be smart. You go and see! Do you like living in America? When will you go back there?”

Lita, who had just met me, was not sure if I was an undercover immigration officer or a DOM representative who was interested in finding out what foreign domestic workers said and did on their rest days. Feeling uncertain of my identity, she refused to divulge information that she thought would be harmful to her and her compatriots. Lita quickly shifted the focus of the conversation since she was not prepared to tell me how the women resisted their subordination.

Lita’s statement, “Then you must be smart. You go and see!,” elicits a key issue that confronts many researchers of live-in domestic service. What is the most accessible and unobtrusive way in which to observe employer-employee relations? The period of field research for this study was not conducive to a length of uninterrupted observation of employer-employee interactions because of employers’ fear of publicity and the exposure of foreign domestic workers to strangers who conceivably could incite employer-employee contestations over work conditions. At any rate, what emerged from a period of field research characterized by shopping, having meals, and conversing with foreign domestic workers who waited for public transportation or who shopped for groceries at farmers’ markets, were the women’s narratives. The narratives recorded Filipina and Indonesian women’s efforts to redefine the conditions in which they performed paid reproductive labor, including challenges to the identities that were constructed for them by the public transcript.

Verbal and Nonverbal Infrapolitical Activities

Defiance Louisa, who contributed to one of the epigraphs in this chapter, appealed to her employer’s sense of logos (logic/reason), albeit with a sarcastic tone of voice. Reminding her female employer that she was a domestic worker, not a thief, she added that it therefore would not be necessary to follow her around the house. Louisa said to me that her words had succeeded in altering her employer’s behavior toward her. Ever since that incident, she had been free to perform housework without close supervision.

Other servants’ challenges to their employers’ behavior and attitudes were less successful in redefining employer-employee relations. In fact, some of the challenges reaffirmed the public transcript of domestic service:

The appearance that power requires are, to be sure, imposed forcefully on subordinate groups. But this does not preclude their active use as a means of resistance and evasion. The evasion, it must be noted, however, is purchased at the considerable cost of contributing to the production of a public transcript that apparently ratifies the social ideology of the dominant. ₃₅

To put it simply, an employer at a certain point may overtly insist that her foreign domestic worker behave in a deferential manner. The servant then expresses deference in a way that challenges her employer’s authority. The consequence of the act, in some cases, may very well reaffirm the employer’s negative perception of foreign domestic workers. For example, Mira, a Filipina servant, told me the following while we were at an afternoon discotheque patronized by Filipinas:

She [employer] scolded me for hanging clothes the wrong way. I did not know how she wanted the clothes to be arranged [on the clothes line in the garden]. She said to me, “Do you understand?” OK-lah. I said “Yes, mum!” [much like a foot soldier reaffirming the command of his sergeant] She slapped me, you know! My employer slapped me! I kept saying “Yes, mum!” until she went back into the house.

Ami, an Indonesian domestic worker who was barely five feet tall, described to me as we waited at a bus-stop, her defiant stance toward her former employer after having been slapped because her employer had not liked the way her instructions had been carried out: “When my employer scolded me, I just looked at her. She told me not to look at her, so I looked at the piano [Ami smiles out of the side of her mouth]. Then, she got angry and slapped my left cheek. God be my witness, I slapped her back and I quit my job.” ₃₆ In both instances, the servants’ actions could well have reaffirmed employers’ insistence on greater forms of control.

At a restaurant, three Filipinas who sat at a table adjacent to the one Louisa and I were sitting at, had the following to say about a compatriot who killed her employer’s baby in 1990. ₃₇

Priscilla:		If they treat us better, we wouldn’t do it [kill the baby]. They treat us like animals, so we act like animals.
Imelda:		My employers think I am stupid. I let them think I am stupid so long as I get my salary.
Carlita:		How much money do you think you can get? RM500, deduct RM30 for levy, deduct RM150 for your debt, and each month you get RM320. Then you buy things and you send money back. You save no money. You stupid!

Imelda’s statement illustrates the extent to which employers can and do dominate work relations and environments: some servants find themselves having to perform acts of self-deprecation in order to receive the wages that are legally due them in the first place. As Carlita implied, the strategy of confirming employers’ belief that foreign domestic workers are less intelligent, ultimately, is counterproductive if the women fail to accumulate savings. In many cases, they are not able to save much money after paying off debts (e.g., debts incurred in employment application fees and passage to Malaysia), buying the latest imported consumer goods, and remitting portions of wages back to family members.

There is, however, a financial avenue in which some get even, so to speak, with their employers.

“Immunizing” Employers In return for the uncompensated labor that is extracted by their employers (e.g., working well into the evening), foreign domestic workers may consistently use their employers’ telephones to call friends and/or families overseas. Some employers’ telephone bills have been known to exceed RM1000 per month. In one case, a Filipina servant was overheard telling her friend that she had slowly “immunized” her employer to expect high telephone charges by gradually raising the charges on monthly statements from the telephone company. ₃₈ Employers who are shocked by exorbitant monthly telephone bills, and/or employers who know of others who have had this experience, lock the telephone or call home intermittently to check on servants’ activities. The women’s infrapolitical acts of defiance reinforce the public transcript of domestic service since they behaved in ways that employers, rightly or wrongly, have come to expect of foreign domestic workers.

Performing the UnexpectedSometimes, Filipina and Indonesian servants’ acts of resistance are spontaneous, while the responses of others are planned. At the same afternoon discotheque in which I interviewed Mira, two Filipina servants respectively shared with me the different ways in which they curbed what they considered were excessive demands of their employers. Renaldo performed a caricature of her female employer’s reaction to her spontaneous performance as she narrated the incident.

Once I got a fever and my employer said to me, “You must continue to work.” I felt so dizzy and she scolded me for washing the plates so slowly. So, I dropped the plates. They just fell out of my hands. She told me to go back to my room and sleep. She picked up the broken plates like this [the servant performed an exaggerated version of the way in which her employer held her rheumatic-ridden hips as she slowly bent down to pick up pieces of plates].

Teresa, on the other hand, took advantage of her employer’s sense of gratitude.

My employer likes me because I take good care of David [baby]. A few weeks ago, she told me that she didn’t know what to do if I went back to the Philippines. I waited a few days and I told her, “Mum, I cannot iron anymore. My wrist is swollen.” She told me that she would take me to the doctor. I said, “No need. My doctor in the Philippines already said that if I use my hand too much, it will hurt” [Teresa laughs]. She employed an Indian woman to iron three times a week.

Renaldo and Teresa narrated their experiences in ways designed to affirm their intelligence—contra the public transcript in which foreign domestic workers were represented as stupid or backward.

It should not come as a surprise that domestic workers’ narratives almost always identified female employers as the abusers. The mutually reinforcing practices of public and private patriarchy that assign Malaysian women the primary role of homemaker then also constitute the women as the primary abusers of foreign female domestic workers.

Filipina and Indonesian servants’ narratives revealed an unstated threshold that governed their responses to verbal abuse by female employers. When employers traversed this threshold with foul language and/or gestures, some women could and did respond immediately and in distinct ways, regardless of the consequences.

On the second day of a week-long Chinese New Year celebration, Ruth’s employer held a dinner for her husband’s colleagues. In the kitchen, the female employer used a series of Cantonese expletives to reprimand Ruth for forgetting to place cognac glasses on the dining room table. Ruth, who had worked in Kuala Lumpur for nearly one and one-half years, understood the meaning of the words and reacted in a way that caused her employer to apologize for the previously crude behavior. In the presence of six other Filipinas, Ruth described the incident.

In the kitchen, she said she was going to do something to my mother [gestures with her hand], and she told me to suck you know [she demonstrates with her lips] . . . I am too embarrassed to say it! How can she even think like this? When she told me to bring the soup bowls to the table, I bring one at a time because I was very angry. All of her friends saw me do it. Yes, she was embarrassed. What do you think her friends would say if they knew what she said to me? Why she treat me like an idiot, I don’t know. After that, she said to me, “Please can you bring all the bowls at once?” She said nicely, so I brought out all the bowls. She dare not treat me like a fool anymore because I will embarrass her in front of her friends.

Pilar added to Ruth’s narrative by describing how she had threatened to quit when her female employer verbally insulted her.

My employer scolded me for waking up at 6.30 a.m. instead of 6 a.m. She followed me into the kitchen and scolded me. She scolded me so hard, I felt dizzy and fainted. She pulled me up from the floor and scolded me some more. So many bad words like “fuck up” and “bitch.” I don’t know why she scold me when I do everything for her. I went to my room and packed my bag. She was scared and asked me not to leave. I carried my bag to the door, and she stood in front of me. Then, she fell to her knees like this [Pilar demonstrates] and said sorry. So I didn’t leave.

Ruth’s and Pilar’s nonverbal responses indirectly questioned the conduct, hence authority of their respective employers. The result in both cases was capitulation on the part of the dominant party.

In the public transcript, foreign domestic workers’ performances are filled with acts of deference (in most cases, at least). In the hidden transcript of domestic service, employers are ridiculed with lewd jokes and performances of exaggerated body movements. These private performances in the presence of compatriots and/or in my presence allowed the women to reconstitute a sense of dignity that was denied them by employers. To be sure, the performances revealed strategies of coping with employers.

Susanti continued to describe her work experience to me while she picked out the freshest fish in the farmers’ market for her employer.

She came home drunk at 5 in the morning. I was so worried. Earlier, she didn’t tell me where she was going. I didn’t sleep all night. I kept her dinner on the table and all of her cats refused to eat because she wasn’t there. She came home and started yelling at me. I was angry but I told her I was afraid that something had happened to her. She yelled at me some more. It was so loud. I am sure people outside the house could hear her. I went to her room and threw out all of her clothes . . . What did she say to me? Nothing. She fell on her bed and went to sleep. The next day, she woke up and told me to get her Panadol [similar to Tylenol] because she had a headache. I purposely made a lot of noise . . . switched on the radio very loud in the kitchen so that she could hear upstairs. She gave me money and told me to go shopping. Weekends are the best times to earn extra money.

Rusiah, who had started work recently as a waitress, explained why she quit her previous job:

[My employer] saw me talking to the neighbor. We were only talking about cooking rendang [Malay version of dry curry]. She parked the car, got out and pulled me by my neck [she demonstrates]. The neighbor saw her do it. She didn’t give me face. I went back to the house and told her I was leaving. She said no, and locked the gate. She put the key in her pocket. She came to my room and banged on the door. She screamed like a crazy woman. I opened the door and said, “What do you want? You want to look at me, yes?” So, I switched on all the lights in the house, opened all the windows and doors and took off all my clothes. I shouted to the neighbors, “Look! Look! I have no clothes on!” I am her twenty-eighth maid in two years. Most left after one to two weeks. I stayed for eight months. My brother [who worked in the construction industry] came to get me and he arranged to change permits so that I can work here [in the restaurant].

Minah, her Indonesian friend who worked for a Chinese family, added:

When I first arrived in Malaysia, my employer scolded me all the time. I cried. Then my friend [she looked at Rusiah] told me [over the telephone] to smile sweetly. So I smiled sweetly every time my employer scolded me. My employer said to me, “I give up. How can I scold you when you smile all the time?” She [employer] told her friend that I bring the family prosperity because I smile so much. She [employer] even struck big when she bought empat ekor [four digit lottery number].

Susanti’s and Rusiah’s narratives constructed middle-class female employers as unreasonable, if not psychologically unstable household supervisor-managers. Even though Susanti successfully devised a strategy with which to deal with her employer, Rusiah was left with little option but to quit her job. Perhaps, Fortuna had a hand in Minah’s good working relationship with her employer. What was important for Minah’s sake was that the simple act of smiling became a successful coping strategy.

Filipina and Indonesian servants who have telephone privileges, rest days, or who are asked to run errands beyond their employers’ houses, are able to share their work experiences with one another. The implication is that those who are prohibited from leaving their employers’ houses and/or from using employers’ telephones, are completely isolated and defenseless. However, some Indonesian domestic workers challenged their confinement in culturally specific ways.

Fasting Indonesian servants who were kept in employers’ houses with no possibility of rest days, could and did draw on the Muslim practice of “fasting” to protest their lack of rights. In fact, it was reported that during the 1991 state threat of deportation, many Indonesian domestic workers abstained from eating to protest the state’s policy of deporting all illegal Indonesian domestic workers. ₃₉

During an interview with Sujanti in her employer’s house (her employer had just left for work), she told me that she had not eaten anything for the last few days. I asked her if she was given enough food to eat, and she nodded her head. I then asked her why she had not eaten anything since the fasting month (Hari Raya Puasa) had long ended. She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me directly without saying a word. A few days later, I was told by her female employer’s neighbor that:

She [female employer] doesn’t treat her servant well at all. She works the girl like a bull. She’s really cruel. Who could work for her? The girl is always up at 5 every morning. I see her outside hanging clothes in the morning and she works non-stop until 10 at night. Sometimes we see her washing their cars late at night. And, when he [female employer’s husband] comes home late, she scolds the girl. We can hear.

I do not fully know what happened to Sujanti, except for the fact that approximately two weeks after the interview, she was sent home to Indonesia.

Siti, an Indonesian servant of a Chinese employer in this study, was sent back to the DOM immediately when she refused to eat. The employer said to me, “She’ll wash two dishes and go back into her room to cry. Every time I spoke to her, she would cry. You know, this is not the right way to treat me. Then, she refused to eat. She wouldn’t eat anything. I was so scared. I called the agent, and he came and took her away.”

Siti’s hunger strike had frightened her female employer, and consequently took her away from a work environment in which she was prohibited from leaving the house; she was not allowed to send or receive mail from Indonesia; and she had not been paid any wages for the first six months of her work tenure. Later, I was informed by an Indonesian servant in the same neighborhood that Siti had been placed with another family, and that on her rest days, she would return to visit her compatriots.

Use of Bodily Fluids Another form of nonverbal infrapolitical activity is some foreign domestic workers’ use of bodily fluids to contaminate their employers’ possessions. A female employer in this study told me that her servant had accidentally cut her finger while chopping vegetables, but that she had refused to put a Band-Aid on the wound. Instead, the female employer found bloodstains all over the clothes that her servant ironed shortly after cutting her finger: “I gave her the Band-Aid and told her to wash her finger before putting it on. The stupid girl didn’t do it. There were bloodstains on every piece of clothing. I tell you, the girl is stupid. What to do?” Yet, the “girl” was not stupid enough since the female employer would ask her to help the seven year-old daughter with her school homework.

I discovered by accident that Lita, the Filipina servant who previously argued that the embassy was ineffective in resolving employer-employee disputes, used her menstrual blood to change her employer’s behavior. One day, during an interview with one of the female employers in this study, I was pleasantly surprised to see Lita walk out of the kitchen. Her employer had just finished complaining about what had happened the day before. She had seen trails of blood all over the house, and upon further inquiry, discovered that Lita was on her menstrual cycle. The female employer went out, bought sanitary pads, and asked Lita if she knew how to use them. Lita answered in the affirmative but she refused to use the pads. In any event, Lita was made to clean up her own blood.

As Lita walked past her employer and me, the employer loudly said that, “Bun Mui [lit: Filipina mui-tsai or girl-slave] are as dumb as the Indonesian ones.” Unfazed by the comment, Lita looked at me and smiled as if to congratulate me for having solved her puzzle.

The female employer had failed to decipher Lita’s symbolic message. Lita was neither backward nor stupid especially since she had worked as a nurse’s aide in Manila prior to her job as a domestic worker in Malaysia. Even though Lita was forced to clean up her blood throughout the house, she successfully redefined the conditions in which her employer demanded her services. As Lita walked toward the staircase, the employer said, “Lita, put the clothes basket on the staircase. I will put it away later. You go back and rest.” The employer then said to me, “Aiyah! No more blood on my floor and bedroom please. So dirty. Better let her rest, take it easy.”

Another case involving bodily fluids in an infrapolitical act occurred one afternoon when I interviewed an employer in her home. Midway through the interview, the employer told me that she had to take her daughter to the music school. Instead of asking me to leave with her, she told me to wait in her house and offered me lunch that the servant had prepared earlier. She said, “Yati is an excellent cook. She is the best maid I’ve employed so far. I’ll ask her to prepare a plate for you.”

After the employer left the house, Yati set the table and brought out the food. She served me and then sat down to chat with me. She said that in the beginning she had had a difficult relationship with her female employer. Yati explained why:

She [female employer] used to say that my cooking was not good enough. I would tell her to “cook it yourself, then you will like it better.” She told me that people with big mouths would get hurt. So, I put saliva [air liur] and hoisin [oyster sauce] in the chicken stew, just the way she likes it. . . . I tell her that it is a special recipe. She eats, her husband eats, the children eat, I also eat. You see, she doesn’t say my cooking is bad anymore. I am a very good cook. Next time I make kangkung with belachan [or sambal kangkung, i.e., vegetables cooked in shrimp chili paste] you should come by. It is very good.

According to various versions of Malay folk wisdom, the recitation of certain mantras while adding one’s saliva to food prepared for others ensures that those who consume the food will behave in ways advantageous to the cook. By the time Yati told me the story of how she had convinced her employer that she was a skilled cook, I had already finished my meal. Nonetheless, I graciously accepted her invitation but my research schedule ultimately did not permit me to return to her employer’s house for another meal.

In the examples above, Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers engaged in individualized infrapolitical activities that altered one or another aspect of employer-domestic worker relations. The most common and final act of protest is the phenomenon of “run away” foreign servants. Contrary to the belief of state authorities, the press, and employers, Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in this study insisted that those who ran away did so to escape their abusive employers (see the examples of Subaidah and Ibu Nin).

Dress by Design: Redefining the Identity of the Maid Filipina servants especially were sensitive to, and critical of, Malaysian discourse that associated all foreign domestic workers with sex-for-sale acts. Ironically, as Filipinas attempt to dress and act in ways that disassociate them from their status and image as servants, the different apparel and demeanor have had the effect of reinforcing the negative perceptions of the Malaysian public. This specific form of resistance strengthens the public transcript of domestic service in which Malaysian employers and the public believe that most, if not all, foreign servants would become prostitutes if given the opportunity to do so.

On their rest days, some Filipina and Indonesian women can be seen clothed in full length dresses or skirts/jeans and blouses while they mingle with their friends at churches, farmers’ markets, shopping malls, and bus and taxi stands. Others make it a point to wear lycra pants, tank tops, and high heels. Salbi’s friend, who was among a handful of Filipina domestic workers selling toiletries and other goods on the property of a church, turned to me and said, “See, look around you. We do not dress like maids. We dress like we work in the office. Very good, huh?” Servants who are given rest days by employers perfect the art of distancing themselves from their image as “maids”: some women go to beauty salons to perm their hair and manicure their fingernails, while others proudly exhibit their various pieces of pricey jewelry.

At a dinner in a fast-food restaurant with a group of Filipina domestic workers, Amy complained that her employer had given her an ultimatum: either she cut her long nails painted fire-engine red or the employer would terminate her contract. Amy told us, “I am not going to cut my nails. She [employer] doesn’t like it because she says that my nails prevent me from washing clothes properly. Who says so? I do my work like any maid. She told me also to wear jeans when I work. Why should I wear jeans?” Rosa, her friend responded, “How can you sweep the floor and clean the toilet looking like this? [Amy was wearing a short, tight skirt and a V-neck tank top]” Amy answered, “No big deal.”

The conversation shifted to psychological tests that foreign domestic workers must pass before they are given their exit and entry permits. Amy described the test: “It is in English and Tagalog. So many questions to answer. There is a picture of a man and a woman, and they ask us to describe . . . [D]raw the hair and draw the clothes. Describe in ten words.”

Nancy who had been relatively quiet, gestured with her fingers. Rosa responded by saying, “Oh, Nancy just wants to sell her puki [“vagina” in colloquial Malay].” In an attempt to pacify Nancy, who was visibly upset by the comment, Amy said: “She [Rosa] just made a joke. Nancy is not like them [pointing to two Filipina domestic workers who had just walked past our table wearing body hugging clothes]. They do this [prostitute themselves] on Sunday to earn extra money. But we are not like them.” The majority of the foreign domestic workers with whom I spoke, indeed, were exceedingly conservative in their views of sex with Malaysian men. Most of the women resented the Malaysian public’s belief that all foreign servants are sexually immoral women.

Foreign domestic workers who date Malaysian men also run the risk of being labeled as prostitutes. Renaldo and “Soon” tried to explain the decision of some compatriots who were in relationships with Malaysian men. (“Soon” was the nickname that the servant’s friends gave her because she would always tell her Malaysian male suitors at the church that she would decide soon if she was interested in dating them.)

Renaldo:		Men sweettalk, already they [servants] give everything. But sometimes, you can’t blame them. They are homesick and also “home sex” [she laughs]. They are human, just like everyone else
Soon:		Some Filipina maids want boyfriends because of the call of nature. It is very hard to control the call of nature.

The combination of public and private surveillance of foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia has had the effect of simultaneously dehumanizing and sexualizing Filipina and Indonesian women. From this perspective, there is little room left for many to perceive foreign domestic workers as women with real emotions, feelings, hopes, and dreams. While male migrant workers are given relatively unrestricted movement in public space, the policies and actions of state authorities, employers, and DOMs, consistently try to strip Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers of “the call to nature,” and other expressions that afford some sense of comfort and belonging to humanity. It is the hidden transcript, as discussed, that records Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ struggle for self and group validation.

 

The Bleak Future

The hidden transcript of domestic service that can reveal foreign servants’ responses to the material and symbolic domination of their employers is shaped mostly by the structure of work environments established indirectly by state authorities, and directly controlled by employers. Taken out of context, foreign domestic workers’ responses, e.g., foot dragging, feigning illness, smearing employers’ possession with blood, and dressing and acting differently on their rest days, may appear trivial and inconsequential. If Filipina and Indonesian women’s verbal and nonverbal infrapolitical activities are considered within the boundaries of what acts are and are not possible in unlegislated work environments that retain the remnants of slavery, then foreign domestic workers are political actors who attempt to renegotiate employer-employee relations in the household in particular, and the Malaysian public’s perceptions of foreign servants in general.

The overall effectiveness of foreign servants’ infrapolitical activities remains questionable. In some instances, infrapolitical activities that sought to change employer-constructed identities and working conditions further strengthened negative representations of foreign domestic workers in and by the public transcript. Within the existing political and economic contexts of Malaysian society, the women’s efforts to demonstrate that they are not dishonest, backward, lazy, and/or sexually-depraved foreign servants, can and do backfire. Presently the identification of informal assemblages as places that nurture covert or clandestine activities of foreign domestic workers have led to raids by state authorities (in search of illegal migrants and/or illegal migrant activities), and many employers’ refusal (at the behest of DOMs) to give servants rest days or even the right to make and receive telephone calls. The fate of informal assemblages appears precarious, and by extension Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ ability once or twice a month to meet with their compatriots and regain some sense of validation as human beings who are deserving of friendship, respect, and dignity.

Contradictions emerging from the Malaysian state’s quest for social stability in the growing presence of foreign migrant workers, and middle-class women’s need for relief from housework, are not without negative repercussions on the lives of Filipina and Indonesian servants. In the next chapter, which provides a closer analysis of middle-class demands for paid reproductive labor, I discuss how and why there is an overall absence, or lack of urgency, in the official and middle classes’ acknowledgment of the need to stem employer-related abuse of foreign female domestic workers.

 

Notes on the Epigraphs

(In order of appearance): Mrs. T. D. Ampikaipakan, “Social Etiquette” Columnist of The Star, November 15, 1993; Author’s interview with “Louisa,” on April 10, 1994, Kuala Lumpur.

---

Endnotes

Note 1: James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), chapters 1 and 7, passim. See also James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Back.

Note 2: Scott, Domination, p. 18. In this chapter, I take the position that story-telling by employers and domestic workers involves the verbal and nonverbal dimensions, e.g., how both parties negotiate or fail to negotiate the use of physical space, demeanor, and so forth. Back.

Note 3: Ibid., pp. 198&-;200 Back.

Note 4: Martha Lee Osbourne, ed., Women in Western Thought (New York: Random House, 1979); Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983); Anne W. Saxonhouse, Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli (New York: Praeger, 1985); and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) Back.

Note 5: In France and England, domestic workers were not given citizenship until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to that, they were considered too dependent on their master-employers to be given such responsibilities. See Teresa McBride, Domestic Revolution: The Modernization of Household Service in England and France 1820–1920 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976). Back.

Note 6: New Straits Times December 11, 1993. Back.

Note 7: Scott, Domination, p. 199. Back.

Note 8: Naomi Abrahams, “Toward Reconceptualizing Political Action,” Sociological Inquiry 62, no. 3 (1992): 327–347. Back.

Note 9: Since the 1960s, two key tenets of feminist scholarship that are encapsulated in the slogans “the political is personal, the personal is political” and “housework is work” have challenged directly intellectual and conventional acceptance of the domestic domain and reproductive labor respectively as nonpublic-nonpolitical space and activities. For representative literature on the gender division of labor in housework, see Ann Oakley, Woman’s Work: The Housewife, Past and Present (New York: Pantheon, 1974/5); Susan Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labour,” New Left Review 89 (1975): 47–59; Margaret Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” Monthly Review 21, no. 4 (1969): 13–27; Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). For representative literature on the politics of female sexuality, see Catherine MacKinnon, Toward A Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970); and Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward A Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). Back.

Note 10: Tan Poo Chang, Status and Role of Malaysian Women in Development and Family Welfare: Policy Implications and Recommendations (Kuala Lumpur: National Population and Family Development Board and Ministry of National Unity and Social Development), 1992; and Husna Sulaiman and Christina Lam, “Family Care and Interactive Time of Professional Mothers,” Malaysian Journal of Family Studies 1, no. 1 (1989): 14–24. Back.

Note 11: See especially Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970); Julie Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America: Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor and the Development of Capitalism (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); Irene Tinker, ed., Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Gavin W. Jones, ed., Women in the Urban and Industrial Workforce: Southeast and East Asia, Monograph no. 33 (Canberra: Development Studies Centre, The Australian National University, 1984); and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Back.

Note 12: See especially Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Mary Romero, M.A.I.D. in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985). Back.

Note 13: Anna Rubbo and Michael Taussig, “Up Off Their Knees: Servanthood in Southwest Colombia,” Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 4 (1983): 14–15. Rollins emphasizes that, “[Deference-giving] remains one of the functions of the domestic servant—the validation of the employer’s class status (and thus the hierarchical class system” (Between Women, p. 180). Back.

Note 14: “Material and objective conditions that allow domestic tasks to be redistributed within the household, regardless of age and gender, will not develop as long as middle class women can transfer most of the household tasks to domestic servants. In effect, the very presence of the domestic workers discourages the collaboration of male household members, children and teenagers. The fact that domestic service is available, therefore reaffirms mechanisms of patriarchy in the heart of the family.” Isis Duarte, “Household Workers in the Dominican Republic: A Question for the Feminist Movement,” Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, eds. Elsa M. Chaney, Mary Garcia Castro, and Margo L. Smith (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 179. Back.

Note 15: Pamela Horn, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), pp. 126–130. Back.

Note 16: This is according to several Filipina servants whose friends worked for wealthy employers. Back.

Note 17: Several interviews of female employers were conducted in country clubs. The employers insisted that the clubs offered a more private, exclusive environment in which to converse. Back.

Note 18: Scott, Weapons of the Weak, pp. 306–312. Back.

Note 19: This is similar to the case in which a corporate employer/manager gives bonuses and/or presents to employees at the end of a profitable fiscal year, or on special occasions in celebration of employees’ service to the corporation. The act of gift-giving, then, serves as an expression of the employer/manager’s gratitude, and at the very same time, allows for the purchase of obligation and loyalty from employees. A key difference between the corporate and household environment is that the latter is unlegislated. Regardless of the intended and unintended consequences of giving gifts to corporate employees, most of the employees are protected by labor legislation in the event of disputes with employers over working relations and conditions. In the household context, gift-giving further complicates an already tenuous relationship that is not recognized by law, and that, in certain cases, can take the form of pseudo-familial relations. This is not to say that employers who give gifts to their servants are not genuinely expressing their gratitude. Rather, it is to point out that gift-giving is another method of purchasing obligation and reaffirming social status. After all, why would an employer of a domestic worker give gifts that are for immediate consumption as opposed to raising the woman’s monthly salary, which then may allow her to better plan for the future? Back.

Note 20: Rollins, Between Women; Donald M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, and War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Romero, M.A.I.D. Back.

Note 21: See especially Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt. Back.

Note 22: See especially David Joel Steinberg, et. al., In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1987). Back.

Note 23: In 1987, the Immigration Department’s bond requirements were RM100,000 from DOMs, and RM1000 from employers. During my field research in 1994, I saw a poster on a wall in the Immigration Department that listed the bond monies for all categories of migrant workers. If employers choose personally to apply for foreign domestic workers’ entry permits as opposed to contracting with DOMs, then employers of Filipina servants must give the Department a RM5000 bond, while those who wish to employ Indonesian servants are required to provide a RM500 bond. See The Star October 3, 1993, in which the state prosecuted several DOMs for runaway servants and other matters. While it can be said that most employers choose to contract with DOMs to handle their applications, the lower bond deposits required of those who do so then encourage a greater level of employer dependence on DOMs. Taken to its logical conclusion, the greater the number of employers who contract with DOMs, the greater the profit for DOMs, and revenue for the state. Back.

Note 24: New Straits Times January 6, 1993. Back.

Note 25: Azizah Kassim, “The Unwelcome Guests: Indonesian Immigrants and Malaysian Public Responses,” Southeast Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1987): 271. Back.

Note 26: “And, while other women fantasized about the perfect male (if articles in magazines are anything to go by), I fantasized about the perfect maid. Faced with a mountain of ironing in the evening after a full day at the office, I would cry hot salty tears onto the ironing board and wonder sadly whether I was indeed destined for a lifetime of drudgery. . . . As usual, I took solace in looking forward to calling my dear friend Premita, at the earliest opportunity I had and pouring all my grievances to her about maids and their sexploits down the telephone line.” Elina Abdul Majid, “The Maid in Malaysia,” Her World (February 1994), pp. 152–153. Her World is one of the most popular Malaysian magazines for modern urban middle-class and aspiring middle-class women. Back.

Note 27: Similarly, Judith Rollins experienced invisibility during her fieldwork as a domestic servant in Boston. She wrote that, “Unlike a third person who chose not to take part in the conversation [between members of the employing family] I knew I was not expected to take part . . . I wouldn’t speak and was related to as if I wouldn’t hear” (Between Women, p. 208) Back.

Note 28: See especially Katzman, Seven Days A Week; and McBride, Domestic Revolution. Back.

Note 29: Scott, Domination, p. 193. Back.

Note 30: Ibid., p. 4. Back.

Note 31: Ibid., p. 200. Servants who were not given rest days by employers, but who ran errands outside of employers’ houses, were interviewed in farmers’ markets and neighborhood grocery and/or hardware stores. Back.

Note 32: “The information grapevine is the informal network of domestic workers who know each other through kinship and friendship. These tend to be built on domestic workers living in the same sending country. . . . one constraint on this network is the mobility of the worker outside her employer’s home. If she has no days off, it is highly unlikely she would be able to meet any of her compatriots. Indeed, some employers deliberately choose not to give their maids any day off, for fear that their employees will meet other maids to compare their relative working conditions. The maid’s ignorance is then construed as an employer’s bliss.” Noleen Heyzer and Vivien Wee, “Who Benefits, Who Profits? Domestic Workers in Transient Overseas Employment,” Issues in Gender and Development no. 5 (1993): 11. Back.

Note 33: Rollins, Between Women, p. 231. Back.

Note 34: Kathy Robinson, in her discussion of public discourse on the exploitation of Indonesian servants overseas, writes that: “[D]omestic service in Indonesia, in particular, is the invocation of familial relations as the appropriate model. Their [servants’] exploitation were seen as more heinous than the exploitation of workers in an industrial workforce” (“Housemaids: The Effects of Gender and Culture in the Internal and International Migration of Indonesian Women,” in Intersexions: Gender, Class, Culture and Ethnicity eds. Gill Bottomley, Marie de Lepervanche, and Jeannie Martin [Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991], p. 49). See also Jean Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Back.

Note 35: Scott, Domination, pp. 32–33. Back.

Note 36: Ami went on to work for another family. I do not know if she worked legally or illegally for the family. I asked her if she had official permission to change employers. She was quiet and then answered yes. Sensing Ami’s reluctance, I chose not to pursue the matter further. Back.

Note 37: Malay Mail December 1, 1990. Back.

Note 38: Personal communication with Caridad Tharan, March 21, 1994. Back.

Note 39: The Star October 29, 1991. Back.