Exploitation and amahs
So long ago that it seems like a whole different life, I was a school teacher. It began to seem futile, though, for two reasons. In the first place I don’t really have the gift, but primarily it was because I was getting kids who had been through the whole of high school learning to be quiet, don’t ask, and don’t think… and now I was supposed to teach them computing. Which is all about lateral thinking and problem solving and other skills diametrically opposed to their whole career in the system.
Or perhaps it was just me. In any case after a few years I decided on a change, and on the principle that a change is as good as a holiday I got a job working for M., an Australian ex-patriate who lived in Hong Kong and made his money betting on horse races.
So I turned up at his door on the 23rd floor of a tower block in a suburb of a hundred identical blocks. The suburb, the station, the shopping centre surrounding the station, and pretty much everything else in sight were named for and built by the corporation who owned the plane I’d flown in on. Hong Kong is wonderfully, utterly, dirty and richly complex city - but it turned out that M. lived in the plastic version. It was a three bedroom apartment and he was intending that I would live in the spare.
Given the price of rentals in Hong Kong I was happy enough to go along with this, even though it meant that M. was going to bother me day and night about his plans and ideas to do with betting and everything else. And besides, the other inhabitant of the apartment was M’s beautiful, warm, charming, motherly, and sorely oppressed Fillipina girlfriend, whom I instantly liked. She did his washing and cleaning, most of the cooking, provided companionship, and pawned the gifts he gave her to send every spare dollar she could manage home to her destitute family in Manila.
I loved her but I was worried and sad about their relationship. On my first night in the city M. took us out to his regular club, which turned out to be the most popular bar of the moment for Hong Kong’s huge Fillipina population. Generally they worked as amahs, but the bar was full of the feeling that a sugar daddy of some kind was a huge advantage. The girls clustered around M. and they clustered around me for a little while too, despite my callow youth. When this became a little too awkward I mentioned my poverty and they left me alone. This rather shocked M., who wasn’t sure if I was crazy or simply naïve. He seemed to regularly take advantage of the girls’ poverty and hope, and that of their families, by inviting them back to his place for drug fuelled orgies. His girlfriend accepted the situation with a degree of resignation, and but told me privately that she expected to have saved enough by the end of the year, or perhaps the next, to buy a cafe in Manila and leave him.
Every apartment in Hong Kong has a small dingy bedroom at the back, without furnishing or air conditioning, for the amah. I was there before reunification and I have no idea how much this has changed since that time, but it was an important contribution to the city’s economy. Every amah who cleaned and cooked and minded children for minimum wage represented a Hong Kong housewife who could now go out to work and earn the family three times as much. I didn’t realise at the time but I was looking at an early and effective form of labour globalization.
But I was also looking, in the case of M., at a situation that just felt so wrong and exploitative. The girls were desperate for a way out of their no future minimum wage jobs, and M. took full advantage in the most sleazy way. I didn’t stick around to see his parties - although I couldn’t change anything I sure couldn’t stand being part of it. As for M., last thing I heard he’d done very well on speculating against the Japanese property market, but I remember him as the slimy, wealthy, loud Australian with this arms around three Filipinas who hoped against hope that he was their ticket out of poverty.
I hope his girlfriend is ok.
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