Book Review: Maids to Order in Hong Kong. Stories of Migrant

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1999

Asian Horizons, 2014

This article examines the phenomenon of labour migration in an age of globalization, particularly the women migrant workers in Hong Kong, and suggests some principles and social virtues in Catholic social thought which can uphold their dignity. Women migrant workers, very often, have to face the problems of sexism, racism and classism in a private working environment. The challenges they face are multidimensional, including personal, familial, interpersonal, and structural. This article first examines the phenomenon of labour migration with the concept of social exclusion. After this, employing narratives of migrant women, the situation of the women migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and the problems that they face are examined. Finally, based on the key principles of Catholic social teaching and the virtues of hospitality and solidarity, the author offers some ethical reflections.

2003

This article examines the complexity of feminized domestic labor in the context of global migration. I view unpaid household labor and paid domestic work not as dichotomous categories but as structural continuities across the public and private spheres. Based on a qualitative study of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Taiwan, I demonstrate how women travel through the maid/madam boundary— housewives in home countries become breadwinners by doing domestic work overseas, and foreign maids turn into foreign brides. While migrant women sell their domestic labor in the market, they remain burdened with gendered responsibilities in their own families. Their simultaneous occupancy of paid and unpaid domestic labor is segmented into distinct spatial settings. I underscore women’s agency by presenting how they articulate their paid and unpaid domestic labor and bargain with the monetary and emotional value of their labor.

Chinese female migrant domestic workers' actions are framed by their position and experiences within a society characterized by divisions and inequalities, the repercussions of which are felt both in the home and workplace. These women confront similar issues to migrant workers in other low-status occupations such as significant inequality, financial insecurity and vulnerability to discrimination and exploitation, except they usually work out of sight and alone in private households. In order to understand how these relatively powerless members of the urban underclass cope with these challenges, we must examine how they respond to subordination and inquire into the underlying rationale for why they respond as they do.

NewBooks.Asia, 2019

Olivia Killias carefully studies the process and infrastructure of care migration. Hardly the smooth transnational flows imagined by globalization, opacity, friction, and explicitly national interests and dialectics characterize the domestic care chain. Focusing on one chain stretching from a rural Javanese village to Malaysia, Killias brings ethnographic detail to an uneven process involving brokers, recruitment agencies, state bureaucrats, maid agencies, individual maids, and contractors. Killias shows—one of her most insightful contributions to the literature—how mobility is controlled and discursively legitimized from multiple perspectives. Women’s travel overseas is reframed as dutiful worship – as halal – and the explicitly domestic nature of her work is emphasized to leave the traditionally male right to mobility intact. Ultimately, Follow the Maid pierces the modernist assumption that contracts necessarily bring about fairer working conditions, showing instead how a system of bonded labor has reappeared – one that draws from colonial indenture programs.

Journal of International Migration and Integration / Revue De L'integration Et De La Migration Internationale, 2011

Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association, 2015

Every Sunday, groups of Foreign Domestic Helpers collectively create informal territories within the urban fabric of Hong Kong’s Central Business District. Foreign Domestic Helpers are migrant workers living in Hong Kong who are legally bound to live in their employers’ homes. They work six days a week, and their duties and lifestyles are dictated by their employers, making them one of the most marginalised occupational groups in the city. Every Sunday – their day off – Foreign Domestic Helpers gather in public en masse to exercise freedom outside of their contractual confinement. In Hong Kong’s CBD these weekly assemblies of Filipino workers disrupt the city’s hegemonic spaces of financial capital. Various urban interior and exterior spaces – shop fronts, footpaths, elevated walkways and atriums – are appropriated and transformed with makeshift cardboard constructions. Hong Kong’s public-private zones are augmented into temporary domesticised places where the migrant workers socialise, rest, eat, groom, send packages, protest, dance and preach. At first glance, the Foreign Domestic Helpers’ occupation of public space may appear chaotically disordered, or an ‘ethnic spectacle’. Closer analysis reveals that this ritualised inhabitation has a unique ecology; it is a temporary but repeated socio-spatial system that produces a collective culture of solidarity, resistance and resourcefulness. Drawing upon ethnographic observations, interviews, photographs and spatial analysis, this paper explores the socio-political and cultural implications of this informal occupation. It demonstrates how Foreign Domestic Helpers are much more than docile subjects of domestic labour, rather, they are actors with agency, operating in an intermediate and mutable spatial zone, somewhere between the private and public sphere.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2022

experiences in many of the camps and transport routes between camps, but it importantly explains why prisoners suffered (and why others did not suffer as much). Essentially, prisoners in Singapore and the Philippines were at the mercy of local Japanese commanders and guards who faced logistical and manpower shortages and prioritized other exigencies. But for Indian, Chinese, and Filipino prisoners, their captivity experience also depended on one's position within the racial hierarchy of Japan's pan-Asianism. In chapter 3, Kovner presents another sobering fact about the infamous "hell ships": "[far] and away the greatest danger to POWs came from friendly fire" (p. 91), as in the case of a US submarine's sinking of the Arisan Maru that became the "largest loss of American POWs in the entire war." In chapter 4, Kovner turns to the wartime debates among Allied officials, Japanese officials, and Swiss diplomats and International Committee of the Red Cross delegates. Chapters 5 and 6 move closer into the territorial core of Japan's empire: Korea and Japan. This spatial structure of the chapters works effectively to make clear Kovner's overarching argument that "when senior Japanese military leaders concerned themselves with Allied POWs, they wanted them to be decently housed, not overworked, and given provisions equivalent to those provided to Japan's own soldiers" (p. 136), as was the case in the "model" camps at Jinsen (Inch'ȏn) and Keijō (Seoul) in Korea. Chapter 6 arrives at camps on the Japanese home front to interrogate "why accounts of the POW experience in Fukuoka are so sharply divergent" (p. 137). Attending to both violence (i.e., executions of captured American airmen) carried out under Japanese officers and POW deaths caused by US firebombing of cities, Kovner shows that the "cruelty and chaos in Japan's POW camps reflected what was going on all across the country" (p. 156). Yet, after Japan's defeat in August 1945, Kovner contends that the ending was only a beginning, and the final three chapters (7-9) address the gargantuan efforts to locating and evacuating POWs, Allied prosecution of war crimes, and the renegotiation of the Geneva Convention on POWs in 1949. Overall, Prisoners of the Empire offers a corrective to military history, as it sets out to do in the introduction (pp. 8-9). By shifting the history of war from the battlefield to sites of detention, Kovner makes important contributions to understanding empires and total war, as well as masculinity and wartime captivity. In some instances, however, opportunities to be in substantive dialogue with scholarly discussions on POWs and empire and state building in conflicts beyond World War II are left unexplored. For example, the POW issue in the Korean War several years later gave rise to remarkably similar claims by Euro-American powers about the inherent cruelty of the Asian enemy, claims that continue to reverberate in popular memory and history. This small quibble aside, Prisoners of the Empire will be invaluable to scholars of international humanitarianism, Japanese empire, and the Asia-Pacific War, as well as scholars concerned with regimes of detention and modern wars of both the past and present.

Diksi

This article explores diasporic problems faced by an Indonesian migrant housemaid working in Saudi Arabia, presented in Denny J. Ali's essay poem "Minah Tetap Dipancung" or "Minah is determined to be beheaded" (2012). This article uses diasporic literary criticism and poetry explication to reveal her tricky situation, struggle against oppression, and voice of hope concerning her profession. The analysis shows that Minah experiences disillusionment. She is oppressed, abused, and alienated because of the cultural barrier. However, Minah resists class and gender-based subjugation. Although she is helpless and determined to face the death sentence, she stands for her dignity. This poem also voices the need to redefine the concept of a migrant housemaid. Government and migrant worker stakeholders should set political will for improving the condition of migrant woman workers, especially legal protection, advocacy, and treatment as professional workers free from cul...