- AFP
- Foreign domestic helpers gather beneath the HSBC building in the Central district of Hong Kong.
Ever wonder if your maid or nanny gossips about what happens in your home? They do, and an increasing number of them are even writing books about it.
One of the more original panels at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on Indonesia’s resort Island of Bali over the weekend was called “Under the Rug.” It featured four Indonesian migrant domestic workers who have written books about their journeys far from home, working in someone else’s home.
“I want to tell people that domestic workers have lives other than at work,” Nessa Kartika, co-author of a book of short stories about the lives of migrant workers in Singapore and Hong Kong told Southeast Asia Real Time. “They also have lives, they also have love.”
Through email lists, social media groups, magazines and even publishers a growing number of maids, nannies and cooks are exchanging stories about their lives and building a growing body of fiction where the humble house help is the heroine. One of the short stories of Ms. Kartika’s book in Bahasa starts with a simple trip to the bank.
“Dina was her name. A brown-skinned girl with long hair. She had just sent her money to Indonesia. She checked the remittance receipts once again to make sure the account number was right. She then waited for the bus at the bus stop.
It was payday, but she didn’t see other Indonesian migrant workers sending their money home. ‘Maybe they’ll send it on Sunday their day off,’ she thought. Dina rarely got a day off. Only occasionally her employers let her out to take care of her own business.”
Don’t expect cheery comedies like “The Nanny Diaries” or “Maid in Manhattan”. These are often the stories of overworked domestic workers forced to sleep on the kitchen floors of small apartments in Hong Kong, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. They are full of drama and pain, love and longing. Maid Novellas might be an appropriate tag for the genre.
In one of the books, “Blood Stained Letter to the President,” the maid named Rosmina at the center of the story is denied food as a punishment so she is forced to eat the food of the five dogs she has to look after. As she’s writing a letter to Indonesia’s president to ask for help, the dogs eat her (thus the title).
“The stories have been dramatized but I have friends like Rosmina,” said one author who goes by the pen name Jaladara and declined to give her full name. She has been a maid in Hong Kong for the last five years. “I’ve heard about rape and even torture by employers.”
The authors said they have written their short stories, poems and plays to share their unique experiences and give this class of reluctant globetrotters a voice.
Forced to live abroad to feed their families, they too often get little respect from their employers or even their relatives that live off of their remittances. Writing is not the only way hard-working international laborers are expressing themselves. Migrant workers in Singapore have recently had their photographs on display.
While most of the Maid Novella readers are other domestic workers, authors say some niche publishers are starting to show interest in their books. The popularity of “Q&A,” the Vikas Swarup book that “Slumdog Millionaire” is loosely based on as well as the Man Booker-prize winning “The White Tiger,” by Aravind Adiga, show that there is a great appetite from what life looks like in Asia from the bottom of the economic ladder.
–Yayu Yuniar contributed to this article.
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