What am I, the maid?

In the US this is a rhetorical question generally employed by people who wish to draw their family’s attention to the fact that they are doing a lot more housework – particularly picking up socks and towels – that should be done by everyone else as well. But in Singapore the question might well be posed by any live-in maid: What am I, the maid? Employee, family member, slave, thief, or spy?

Live-in maids are so inexpensive in Singapore that they are often cheaper to hire than a weekly cleaning service. Just think of how it must feel to live in someone else’s home, not as a renter or roommate, but as an employee. What rights would you have?

Most maids in Singapore come from other, poorer countries – generally Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia. Phillipine maids tend to speak more English and can more easily work in ex-pat homes, so they are more expensive. Indonesian maids were so exploited by Singaporeans that the Indonesian government demanded that they be paid an extra $150/month to deter the worst cheapskates (bringing their total pay up to a whopping $450/month). But in any case they are far from home and the protections that might be provided by friends and family – and even the protections they might claim from their own governments are tempered by the fact that the employer or the maid brokerage service keeps their passports.

It starts right away – the passports are locked away so that, if the maid turns out to be a thief, she can’t go home. Fair enough, sort of, since if you have someone else live in your house she necessarily knows where you keep all your valuables. She can meet up with some guy from her home land – say on the one Sunday afternoon off per month you are required to give her – and let him in to take your goods when you’re not home. So why trust this person you have in your house?

Face it – you HAVE to trust the people living in your house, or there’s no peace of mind. And you have to trust the person doing all the scut-work you don’t want to do – caring for your aged parents, caring for your infant children, cooking for you. But how can you trust someone you’ve hired after one interview, or because she’s cheap? Cover your ass – sequester her passport.

Or it could be for her own protection – that sweet-talking guy from her homeland can easily persuade her to run away with him, and then he can sell her into a brothel in Thailand, Vietnam, anywhere they go with their passports. At least if she stays in Singapore she has rights as a registered alien worker – assuming she has the nerve, knowledge, and language skills to assert them. She has the right to an annual trip home, paid for by her employer, likewise three or four annual medical check-ups. I believe she also has a right to have a cellphone – at least I have never met a maid without one – but even that is a prickly question. Does the maid have a right to privacy?

The husband of one of my colleagues checked through their maid’s cellphone records, and examined all the photos she had taken. She had sent someone a photo of herself in her underwear in the employer’s bathroom, which caused a huge kerfluffle – partly because she was showing a stranger the inside of her employers’ house, and partly because the employer often sees himself as responsible for the sexual purity of the maid.

Some employers sexually assault their maids – this happened often enough that maids below the age of 23 are no longer legally employed in SIngapore (I guess over 23 you’re no longer attractive). But MANY employers want to control all the social contacts their maids have, to ensure their own security. You can see how that works – if she has a boyfriend she can have him in the house while you’re away, and who wants that? – but on the other hand it’s tough on the maid, who may well want a social life.

Most maids have Sunday afternoons off – as I mentioned, they’re legally entitled to one afternoon off per month – and on that day they put on their best clothes and go to town. They congregate with others from their home countries and towns, have picnics in the parks, window shop, chat and snack. But this is also when they can make friends with the wrong kinds of people (wrong from the employers’ point of view), who may try to woo them away or worm into your house while you’re gone.

Chinese employers are notorious for overworking their maids. There are several cases a week where maids fall to their deaths from high-rises in the city – not because they were pushed, but because they were cleaning the outsides of windows, leaning precariously out to reach the corners, when already exhausted by all their other duties. Among maids, working for American or European employers is known to be the best option, in terms of workload.

It is illegal to beat a maid in Singapore, and the frequency with which maids are beaten shows in the fact that they had to pass a law to make it illegal. While I was there a police commissioner was found guilty of beating his maid, because (he claimed) she was stupid. He was jailed, and rightly so, but he was one of the few caught and brought to book.

Maids are trained by the brokerage agencies to please their employers by doing whatever they are told. Yet, of course, if you’re asking someone to run your household, watch your children, care for your elderly, you need someone who will use her best judgment. Being a maid militates against exercising judgment – any initiative in any direction is likely to offend the employer. So if the six-year-old demands a pencil from you so she can do her homework, you go get the kid a pencil. One of my friends found her children growing so lazy and demanding that she got rid of the maid – that way the kids at least had to fetch their own pencils.

And finally, maids have to deal with their own families back home. Those cell phones are in constant use, keeping in touch with maids’ own children or husbands, or with parents. Generally this is a good thing, right, to console the maid for being so far away from her loved ones. But it can also be poisonous – the people at home, unemployed, gambling and drinking, can demand more and more money from their industrious daughter/sister, guilting her into handing them her entire paycheck without any provision for her own future security.

So what am I, the maid? What is the maid in Singapore, or anywhere? Trusted family member? Charity case? Spy? Slave? Thief? This question is at the heart of the incessant nattering in Singapore – and any place where hiring domestic help is part of the culture – about the servant problem, the maid problem, the unreliabilty of foreign workers, etc. etc. etc. I found these conversations interesting at first, then tedious to listen to, because there is no answer, and the maid never gets to participate. What is the maid? This question so puzzled me that I couldn’t stomach hiring one and did my own damn work.

It doesn’t help that the ruling party also rules the media and airwaves.  You never read or hear of the activities or platforms of the opposition parties, although they do exist.  Several years ago the ruling party had a rally in a stadium, and a long shot appeared on TV showing the crowd.  An even greater crowd filled the stadium at the opposition Workers’ Party rally, but no long shots were shown; the crowd was too big for government comfort, because so many people went to the rally to hear the speakers – that was the only way they could find out what the opposition was saying. So nobody knew how popular the opposition rally was until some brave soul put a long shot of it on the internet.

Recent government policy – surprise! –  outlaws putting political events on the internet.  It’s widely anticipated that in the wake of this election there will be many lawsuits against violating Youtube account holders, as the government follows its traditional policy of slowly, legally squashing the opposition through use of the law.

The system is modelled on the British Commonwealth one, where candidates are nominated (tomorrow) and campaigning occupies about 2 weeks. Long enough, says my friend, for nasty rumors to really get going but not corrected.  Then on May 7 the election is held, with teachers and other civil servants required to man the polling stations (they get a holiday some other day in May), and we’ll see what happens when the dust settles.  Will the PAP (People’s Action Party) retain its majority in the Parliament?  I think they currently have 90% of the seats.

So on the eve of nominations, everyone in the office is really excited, chatting of little else. It’s contagious.

There are similar regulations in Malaysia.  Very hands-on control of real estate and banking in this part of the world.

A Chinese friend says in Beijing it’s 7%.  Everyone groans over this terribly high interest rate, which is lower than the US average over the last 30 years…

Just FYI.

Turns out it’s not simple. In the first place, the whole building and contracting tender system in Malaysia is conducted behind closed doors, so nobody knows what the lowest bid was. So nobody knows how much a builder or services contractor gets to keep in his own pockets once a contract has been “won” – a better word is “awarded.”  Easy money for contractors!

OK, said I, but surely it can’t be so difficult to hire some poor but honest person to clean the bathrooms once or twice a day? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile in a tourist-oriented place?

Well, turns out it is difficult, and that’s because of the easy money problem. Nobody wants to earn a simple living by cleaning stuff (or actually performing any services) because the whole culture revolves around the notion of easy money – of skimming off the top. With toilet cleaning, there is no top. Unless you run a cleaning firm. So let’s say your cleaning firm wins a contract to clean toilets at the museum. You of course don’t mind overseeing the actual cleaning person, but doing the work yourself is out of the question. So you hire someone to do it it for a pittance. That person may or may not do the cleaning – you don’t surpervise them very closely, because you already have your cut from the contract and don’t care if the toilets are clean. And the cleaning person probably doesn’t care either – nobody’s checking to see if the job is done, nobody’s in a position to receive or act on negative feedback from customers. So money may be spent, but nothing gets done.

This is apparently a big problem in Malaysia, where the bidding process is closed. In Singapore, by contrast, the uncle or aunty who cleans the bathrooms is accountable to their supervisor, and if there are complaints from end-users the supervisor makes life miserable for the cleaner. (In turn, the cleaning company is not paid if the cleaning is not done – a condition that seems not to obtain in Malaysia.) The bidding process in Singapore is open, so everyone knows who is responsible. People claim that there’s an easy money mentality in Singapore too, at least for the already-wealthy, but it doesn’t seem to trickle down to the point where nobody does anything, because they’re always hoping for a cut from an uncle in the construction business.

Chinese New Year is a 15-day period in which you stage many family reunions and feasts, in a particular order: visit the husband’s parents on the first day, wife’s parents on the second, and grandparents, uncles and aunts in descending birth order.  But in Singapore it’s a public holiday of just two days (the indians and malays man the transit systems and other vital functions while the chinese majority celebrates).  This is in keeping with the practice of fairness in allotting public hoidays to each major religion: Christians get Christmas and Good Friday; Hindus get Deepavali and Vesak Day (although since Vesak celebrates the birth of the Buddha you can argue that it’s really a chinese thing, but that first Buddha was Indian, so I guess it’s fair enough); Eid-ul-Fitre and Hari Raya Haj to the muslims.  Other public holidays are New Year’s Day and National Day.

Anyway we’re enjoying lazing around, so happy Lunar New Year, everyone. Prosperity, health and happiness to all!

And there’s also a lot of thoughtful planning going on.  Think about clean drinking water; Singapore is one of the few countries in Asia where you can drink what comes out of the tap without boiling it.  (Hong Kong is another.)  There is a serious water policy here, not only in terms of draining off the torrential monsoon rains so that the island does not revert to swampland, but in terms of water independence.  Through rainwater capture, Singapore is cutting down on the amount of water it needs to import from Malaysia (with which country relations are not always 100% amicable).  And in running a lot of that water, plus cleaned up sewage, through the state-of-the-art reverse osmosis treatment plants, Singapore gets water that is not only drinkable, but suitable for the biotech and chip industries that it wishes to encourage – the high-end manufacturing Friedman mentions in his article.  And incidentally, almost the ONLY manufacturing that happens here these days, as so many manufacturing jobs are outsourced to China.

It’s about educational and governmental seriousness in Singapore, and a plea for the U.S. to emulate it. His hook is the story of a primary school teacher conducting a DNA workshop with her fifth graders, on her own initiative. And I agree with him that the U.S. would do well to emulate the seriousness of Singapore governing and educational policy, but there are a few things he did not mention. So here’s my reaction.

Note that this exemplary teacher was teaching outside of the curriculum, which is semi-ossified.  People’s life courses depend on the results of the high-stakes exams conducted throughout primary and secondary school, and you can’t change the exams without upsetting a lot of apple carts.  Those fifth-graders won’t be tested on their knowledge of DNA and she won’t get a performance bonus for this. But good for her, anyway.

Yes, Singapore does take governing seriously. But it also controls national media, which is what I think you need to keep a civil and serious tone in politics. No way we can emulate that. Unless we can shut down Rush Limbaugh and ditzes on both right and left, there will be no progress on this front in the U.S. Name-calling, obscenity, violence and sports will continue to dominate our national media.  (Which is why I have not owned a TV in the U.S. since 1992.)

Gay sex is illegal in Singapore. Drug dealing carries the death penalty. Of course the government has discretion in pursuing malefactors of different types. Fortunately it’s going after drug dealers more seriously than lovers.

I should also note that Singapore has a lot of informants everywhere – I won’t use the word spies – so that if a fundamentalist Christian preacher or an imam starts using hate speech or calling another sect or race godless infidels, he is quickly brought in to a ministry office and told to stop, or his church will be shut down. Consensus and ethnic harmony trump free speech, no question. And that’s why government works in Singapore.

Government here has a LOT of power, and we must just be grateful that the people with that power are on the whole serious and fair-minded.

It’s a bit unfair for Friedman to dangle the benefits of this type of government before our eyes as if we could suddenly transform the national mode of discussion….

Here’s the flagship dragon, with tropical fish along his belly:

Next on a floating platform we have the Monkey King and the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, with other pals from the Journey to the West.  Yes, the non-immortals are riding on a turtle whose head goes in and out of its shell:

Next five horsemen on another floating platform. The horses move back and forth on sub-platforms.   I know the middle one has to be Guan Yu, the great warrior. My friend says one of them is an immortal who ate human flesh – you can tell because he’s ugly. I am not sure I can distinguish him. The others I’m not sure about – they don’t seem to be from Three Kingdoms, which is Guan Yu’s story, so I guess it’s some other tale. Anyway, two views of them:

And finally, happy leaping golden-scaled fish on a floating platform in the foreground, with an entire bridge covered in a lantern with a coral reef theme in the backgroung, sponsored by the Underwater World aquarium.  You can’t see the pink dolphins leaping up and down, but they’re there:

Is this fun or what?