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 generally hostile environment. These "maids" are both widely used in Hong Kong and widely abused both by their Chinese employers and by the government regulating their work. The Filipina domestic worker not only deserves more respect and humane treatment than she generally receives from her Chinese employer in Hong Kong, she is also a complex, spirited, open-hearted soul full of life, intelligence, and insight into herself, her employers and her relationship with...