Maid to Order in Hong Kong Review

Yeung, Wai Sik (Wilson)

Asian American Studies 151

April 26th, 2010

Maid to Order in Hong Kong Review

As middle-class Chinese women entered the Hong Kong work force in great numbers over the past two decades, the demand for foreign domestic workers soared.  As of the year 2000, “over 200,000 Hong Kong households (over 10 percent of the total of 2.1 million households) employed domestic workers” (64).  Anthropologist Nicole Constable tells the stories of these domestic helpers in her work, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers.  Interweaving her analysis with evidence that she collected in her field studies, she shows how power is expressed in the day-to-day lives of the Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong.

The thesis of Maid to Order in Hong Kong is to “link the treatment of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong to social, cultural, and historical patterns and to document and analyze factors that contribute their oppression” (12). Specifically, Constable does so by exploring the themes of globalization, gender, and resistance & empowerment in the context of this “international flow of domestic workers.”

Constable begins her work by exploring the theme of globalization through the history of domestic helpers. According to Constable, in the 1980s, as the Philippine economy worsened, married and unmarried Filipinas left their families to work in homes of Hong Kong and other parts of Asia (18).  In this increasingly globalizing world, many under-performing economies are encouraging its citizens to immigrate.  In fact, the author points out that “Filipina domestic workers are a valuable source of income for hundreds of recruitment and placement agencies in the Philippines and in Hong Kong, an important source of labor for Hong Kong employers, and a crucial source of foreign capital for the Philippine government” (63).  By describing the economic motives behind this “trade of domestic helpers,” Constable point to globalization as a core theme of her work.

        In addition, Constable focuses on the theme of gender throughout her work.  She writes, “Of the over 150,000 foreign domestic workers in 1995, about 95 percent were women” (3-4).  This observation points to the fact that female workers are ubiquitously preferred over their male counterparts.  By making observations through a gender lens, Constable is suggesting that women are “commodified” and “controlled” by their home government, employers, and employment agencies to further political and economic gains.  Constable describes how domestic helpers are controlled and disciplined by employment agencies, by employers themselves, and by state policies such as the “Two Week Rule.”  As Constable notes in her work, the forms of discipline range from physical abuse to intrusive regulations including restrictions on hair length and prohibition of make-up.  It is exactly through this idea that economy, ethnicity, and gender are inter-connected in this discussion of domestic helpers.