Maid to Order in Hong Kong,Stories of Filipina Workers

Nicole Constable, in Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers, describes the physical and psychological lives of those domestic workers in the homes of Chinese in Hong Kong, their attitudes toward own lives and work, and the attitudes of the workers and the Chinese toward one another. Constable's primary purpose, from a scholarly perspective (she is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh), is to document the particulars of the lives of these women for others interested in labor relations, cross-cultural attitudes, class differences, and the role of the state in regulating foreign workers. However, underlying this scientific viewpoint is the author's clear intention to humanize a group of workers who have previously been dehumanized both by their employers and by those with no first-hand knowledge of the women's experience, but with much prejudice about the women themselves. The book's scholarly depth, theoretical concerns and full documentation qualify it as a work for researchers in related fields, but its focus on these women as human beings involved in a difficult cross-cultural drama also qualifies it as fascinating material for the lay reader.

Constable is successful in accomplishing both of these goals. The author draws book portraits of individual Filipina maids in Hong Kong from both the anthropological and the human point of view, and also gives a clear and objective sense of life for these women as a foreign class in a g

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cization. All of the Filipinas must deal with these conditions, including "local forms of xenophobia, occupational and gender stereotypes, attitudes about ethnic, racial, and cultural differences, as well as local laws and government policies" (xiii). The latter two serve as especially frightening obstacles to those Filipinas who work outside the law, by necessity or choice, such as working for more than one employer. Constables writes that her specific foci are the forms of control or discipline that Filipina domestic workers experience in their dealings with recruitment and placement agencies in the Philippines and in Hong Kong, with employers, and with government bureaucracy, rules, and regulations . . . [and] the multiplicity of ways that domestic workers respond to such discipline (xiii). The book covers the spectrum of the lives of these women and their work, and the study of the same, including theory and history related to their roles in the political economy, related literature, the export of labor to Hong Kong, types of "imported" domestic workers in the history of Hong Kong, employers' discipline of the workers, and the responses of the workers to such discipline. By far, the most intriguing subjects in the book h

Category: Foreign - M