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span class="caption" style="width: 177px;">XU XI: (Photo by Paul Hilton)The day our cook threatened to quit, I witnessed my first layoff.

The victim was Ah Siu. Hers was a no-name name, without clear demarcation for a family or first name. Back when my father still had money in the 1960s, she was hired to look after the four children. “Nanny” would be too classy, “domestic helper” too modern and politically correct. Back then she was a “servant”, along with our cook and washerwoman.

When she first arrived, I was around 9 and promptly fell in love. She was everything my mother could not be: lenient, undemanding, tolerant of my childishness. Most of all, she seemed to favor me, or so I imagined, the unworthy eldest child whose only job in the family was to serve as an “example” for the younger ones. I despised my exemplary role, even as I guarded it with fierce pride, relishing the privilege of being told that Mummy must take care of brother because he’s sickly, or sister who’s still small, or sister who’s not as good a girl as you. I didn’t always trust that praise, wondering if perhaps Mummy actually didn’t want to take care of me. Ah Siu gave me all her time, listening to my stories, paying me undivided attention, treating me like her own girl.

All three servants boarded with us,
sharing a bedroom in the rear two-bedroom guest flat we owned, and only had one day off. They were expected to start work at sunrise and retire at night, often quite late. My parents did not like us spending time in their quarters, but I hung out in the rear apartment, curious and lovestruck, my excuse being the piano, which I practiced in that living room. I thought of the servants as part of our family because, despite everything my parents said to the contrary, I saw no difference between them and us, especially not Ah Siu.

It was a shock, then, when she told me she had a home in the New Territories and a little girl, a daughter she saw once a week, on Sundays, her day off. How could she belong to someone else? She was my Ah Siu, mine! Yet I quickly swallowed that thought, overwhelmed instead with sorrow that Ah Siu couldn’t live with her family and turned my anger toward my parents, Mum especially, that such employment injustice existed. However, this did not translate into my not having Ah Siu. I was a pragmatic, if melodramatic child.

After that, I treated Ah Siu with a little distance, except when the desire to be babied overwhelmed. If my report card was less than stellar, Ah Siu gave me a never-mind smile. If Ah Yee, the cook, yelled, as she often did, I could flee to Ah Siu’s tenderness. I was not a sissy child, and in fact, resisted tears to win the “good girl” accolade from Mum. But what I recall of Ah Siu was a sweet refuge in the raucous household of my childhood, where my father was often overseas on business, my mother overwhelmed and exhausted by the household and servants, where guests needed “to be waited on hand and foot” as Mum said of our numerous Indonesian relations, especially those of my father’s, because the servants and my mother had to work twice as hard for these folks, accustomed to legions of servants in their large Indonesian homes, in contrast to our puny three.

* * *

Then came the big fight, the details of which I never knew, between Ah Yee and Ah Siu. Shouts and tears. Mum intervening. Loud threats by our cook that she would quit, right now, if Mum didn’t fire that woman. Before I knew it, Mum said Ah Siu was leaving. Not a single objection I raised was heard; a good cook, however temperamental, was harder to find.

Ah Siu packed her things and prepared to leave.

I sulked. I refused to leave my bedroom. So what, I told myself, she’s only a servant, echoing my mother’s words.

At the last possible moment, I snatched my favorite thing of the time — a tiny statue of Mercury with his quicksilver wings — and ran to the front door. Here, I said, this is for you, and tried to tell her about the Greek messenger god. But I was inarticulate, unable to tell a story, unable to arrive at catharsis.

She took the statue, smiled a never-mind smile, hugged me, and we cried in each other’s arms.

* * *

And now I am grown up, or at least pretend to be, and to date have not perpetuated the indentured servitude of a “domestic helper” for myself. Once, back in the ‘80s in New York City, I hired a part time cleaning woman from Columbia. Watching her work, I felt slightly ashamed, because after all, I should be capable of cleaning up my own mess. Throughout my adult life in Hong Kong, I have cleaned and cooked for myself. Of course, unlike many friends and acquaintances, I do not have children as well as a career, so I don’t have to balance that equation. Yet I cannot help feeling there is something wrong with the equation, that it is fundamentally unsound, even if it is the basis of the global economy of the servant class.

Why is it Hong Kong’s well being depends on perpetuating the servant class?

Today’s Ah Siu’s are Filipino. Her day off is usually Sunday, and in some households, she works the long, absurd hours of my family’s servants back in the ‘60s. I know all the arguments: Hong Kong provides employment for a nation of people whose economy needs help; our city has laws and does not tolerate abuse or unfair treatment of the servant class; this is just the way of the world, isn’t it, that some rule and others serve? The subtext is clear: in the end, they are “only servants”, democracy be damned.

Yet what is it about our culture that this upstairs-downstairs practice thrives so long and well, this wholly intolerable thing?

This year, my sister and I became employers, for the first time in both our lives, of two domestic helpers from the Philippines. They do not clean, cook or care for either of our households, because their jobs are to live with and look after our elderly mother who has Alzheimer’s, and who needs round-the-clock monitoring. One woman is a qualified nurse, the other an excellent cook. Both of them are educated and intelligent professionals, as well as wives and mothers, hardly “servants”. We call them employees, and though I live at my mother’s address, my space is separate and I clean it myself. The only concession is to have them do my laundry, as there is only one washing machine on location. But the ironing is my job since I am fussy about my clothes. This is not something I need to employ someone to do for me.

For my mother, however, as her memory fades, she has her “girls” at home to simulate the noise and chatter of family, since none of her real family live with her. My mother, as she grows more frail slips in and out of the life she once knew, ordering the “servants” around as a salve to pride, even though they know better than to pay attention. It is unenviable, the way we age today.

And I am merely a messenger, the fleet-of-foot god, with the story of a privileged history I cannot revise. All I can do is try to live a life that does not perpetuate the wholly intolerable, to avoid what strikes me as childish practices, the ones my city seems so unable to eliminate.

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