In Service and Servitude: Preface

Christine B.N. Chin

1998

Preface

This narrow path has been trod many a time already, it’s only that this time the journey is one to mark the way.

—Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 1975

Southeast Asia, Political Geography.
From Harm De Blij and Peter Muller, Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Copyright © 1997 John Wiley and Sons. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

My interest in the relationship between domestic service and development can be said to have been “years in the making.” I was brought up in an upper-class Malaysian Chinese extended family that was the very model of the classic Chinese “three generations under one roof” wherein family members were served twenty-four hours a day by nannies, housemaids, and cooks. In time, nannies grew old, while housemaids and cooks were difficult to employ because of the expanded employment and education opportunities for working-class women that were brought about by development. Consequently, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, my extended and nuclear families, along with the families of the expanding Malaysian middle classes, began employing female domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.

Until only a few years ago, however, that interest in the relationship between domestic service and development existed only in the remotest periphery of my intellectual consciousness. The patriarchal-class environment in which I was socialized as a young child ensured that the issue of housekeeping unmistakably was the responsibility of my mother, my aunts, and my paternal grandmother. Whether or not servants performed household tasks in a timely manner, or indeed if there even were enough servants to perform the tasks at all, remained the sole responsibility of the older women in my extended family, while the men went to work in their respective offices and the grandchildren were free to pursue the less mundane tasks of everyday life.

The relationship between domestic service and development was not a problematique since I pursued, in higher institutions of learning in the West, an intellectual path characterized by inquiry into matters of national, regional, and global concern that, in turn, were steeped in contestations over political, economic, and/or explicitly cultural resources. Along that path I also encountered important topics such as women and war, economy, politics, development, and literature. Rarely, if ever, was the relationship between domestic service and development deemed important enough for discourse or even cursory inquiry.

To be sure, in the context of scholarship on Malaysia and Southeast Asia, studies of the effects of development structures and processes on women have centered mostly around the nature of women’s participation in rural and urban (especially manufacturing industries) economies. The inference is that domestic service performed by women was and continues to be perceived as too removed from the spotlight of development in its political and economic dimensions. Some of the key reasons for this, I believe, are the physically segregated nature of domestic service that obscures its contribution to development along the political, economic, and social dimensions; and the association of paid reproductive labor with upper-class or aristocratic pursuit of physical comfort.

My gradual awakening to the importance of the relationship between contemporary domestic service and development in Malaysia occurred in the summer of 1993, when I returned to Kuala Lumpur to visit with relatives. Early one morning, as I was having breakfast in the kitchen of a relative’s house, I heard the sound of muffled crying that emanated from the neighbor’s backyard. I walked out of the kitchen and into the backyard in search of the source. As I leaned over the metal fence (the majority of the modern houses are two-story link or row houses separated by fences in the front and back of adjoining structures), a horrifying image confronted me.

I saw a young woman crouched in a corner below the neighbor’s kitchen window. Around one of her legs was a long chain (normally used to restrict the movement of house pets that are let loose in backyards) attached to the kitchen’s sliding metal door. I asked her who she was since I did not recognize her as a member of the neighbor’s family. She cried as she said that she was the family’s Filipina servant. Her female employer, who was going out to shop for groceries in a nearby farmers’ market, had chained her to the back of the house to ensure that she would not eat the family’s food in her absence.

Feeling disgusted, I went back into my relative’s house and asked Margaret (pseudonym), the Filipina servant, all of what she knew about the frequency with which her compatriot was abused in that specific manner. Margaret looked away and kept quiet as I spoke to her. I then asked the other members of the household if they were aware of the way in which the female neighbor abused her servant, and if so, had they ever challenged the woman’s behavior. The very prompt reply instructed me to mind my own business: it was not the concern of the household because the neighbor was “crazy.” Consequently, I decided to wait for her to return from the market. Suffice it to say that my conversation with her left two feuding families in its wake. Hindsight warrants that I acknowledge having sowed the seeds for this study on that day, even though I had no idea that my encounter with the abused servant would shape the future direction of my intellectual thought and career.

A few days later, Margaret who had spoken merely a few words to me since I arrived, began to engage me in conversation about life in the United States. She considered me as her employer’s strange, long-lost relative who was not only “brave” (to use her word) enough to challenge a crazy neighbor, but who also voluntarily fetched her own clothes and drinks, and washed her own dinner plates—arguably, habits that may have been the result of the manner in which living away from my extended and immediate families, and equally important, living without the benefit of another woman’s domestic labor for so many years, could not but encourage a “self-serving” lifestyle.

Acknowledging that I was as curious about her life as she was mine, I asked if she would allow me to accompany her to the Sunday church service (the overwhelming majority of Filipina domestic workers are Christians). It was there that I entered a different world—the “public” world of foreign female domestic workers. It was there that the seeds of this study began to sprout.

During the 1993 visit in Kuala Lumpur, I spoke with a variety of Malaysians. Among them were activists who counseled foreign female domestic workers—in particular, women who had run away from abusive employers. I learned that Filipina and Indonesian servants complained of insufficient food and rest, physical assault, and in certain cases, even rape. Not only was I ashamed to “discover” that educated (“civilized”) Malaysians were capable of mistreating and abusing foreign domestic workers, I was surprised also by the responses of many with whom I conversed on the topic: they did not consider employers’ denial of sufficient food and rest days for foreign domestic workers as incidences of mistreatment. Indeed, I felt even more bothered when I thought back to my boarding school days in England in which I had to constantly remind my peers at school (especially those who consistently marveled at my ability to use a toothbrush to clean my teeth, and/or the way in which my verbal enunciations reflected a command of the “Queen’s English”) that Malaysians were neither uncivilized (“No, we do not live on top of coconut trees”), nor were we entirely illiterate.

After all, Malaysian society had excavated itself from the tutelage of British colonial masters in 1957, and the people had survived the May 13, 1969 ethnic riots—the one time there had been a mass outbreak of physical violence between Malays and Chinese which had threatened to undermine the perceived political and economic progress that was made after independence. In the attempt to quell physical fighting between Malays and Chinese, the Malay-dominated state immediately instituted emergency rule.

In 1971, when Malaysian society emerged from emergency rule, the state implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP) 1971–1990, essentially an affirmative action export-oriented development program for Malays, the politically and numerically dominant ethnic group in the country. The NEP was charged with correcting socioeconomic imbalances in interethnic relations that had originated in the period of colonial rule—i.e., real and perceived Chinese control of the economy at the expense of Malays, the heirs of the country.

In spite of or perhaps because of the NEP, sustained economic growth since the mid and late 1980s has been achieved in Malaysia. Today, the country and the peoples are well on their way to coveting the much-prized “developed” status that is synonymous with the advanced industrialized world. The NEP’s successor, the National Development Policy (NDP) 1991–2000 that further encourages export-oriented development, embodies state elites’ efforts to create a developed society and country by the year 2020.

Upon my return to the United States at the end of the summer of 1993, I reviewed reports published by transnational nonstate organizations concerned with foreign female domestic workers’ welfare all over the world. I quickly realized that the phenomenon of employer-abuse of foreign servants is not restricted to Malaysia. Many employers throughout Asia, the Middle East, and the West are implicated similarly in abusing foreign servants. Employer-related abuse may be and is facilitated, if not reinforced, by the absence of national labor legislation that protect Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia and many other labor-receiving states, while labor-sending states such as the Philippines and Indonesia continue to encourage female out-migration.

Various reports of rising transnational incidents of abuse implied that there was a yet-to-be explored relationship between the state-led transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor and the global expansion of neoliberalism that celebrates open markets and free trade—including the trade in and market for foreign female domestic workers. This knowledge offered to me the possibility of conducting a comparative study of transnational migrant female labor, especially given the increasing global valorization of neoliberalism.

Instead of pursuing this research path, I chose to return to Malaysia in 1994, formally to begin field research of the relationship between contemporary domestic service and development. While it can be said that I did so largely because of key intellectual reasons that are presented in the introductory chapter of this study, I am compelled also to acknowledge that my identity as a Malaysian cannot be divorced or suspended from my identity as a scholar. The global move to deregulate, privatize, and/or liberalize national economies, places multidimensional pressures on postcolonial societies and states such as that of Malaysia. What is called (economic) “globalization,” and its oft-lauded promise to improve everyday life, can and does harbor the potential to undermine the individual and collective sense of self that is at the core of humanity. As such, the denigration of Filipina and Indonesian women as domestic workers, in Malaysia and elsewhere, should not be accepted as part of the global, regional, national, and personal journeys toward economic prosperity.