GloPos0.04 - Editorial by Dominic Chua

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EDITORIAL
by DOMINIC CHUA

Maid Musings

The story which Celine related to me as we were preparing for the TWC2-GloPos Forum is still deeply lodged in my memory. The scene: a hair salon at Coronation Plaza. The actors: a wealthy upper middle class Chinese lady, her two maids (Sri Lankan? Filipina? Indonesian?), and the Chinese hair stylist. The woman is having her hair done, and has brought her maids along for a haircut as well. The stylist asks one of the maids how she’d like her hair done. At this point, the woman butts in with the remark, “Any way also can. It doesn’t matter. She’s just a maid.”

“She’s just a maid.” Those four words provide a glimpse of the insensitivity and prejudice that lurk in the darker recesses of the Singaporean psyche. They underlie what NMP Braema Mathi terms the ‘quiet indignities’ that we inflict on a group of women that leave behind their parents, husbands and children to toil and do work that is, for the most part, taken for granted. They numb us to just how inhumane our litany of demands is: rousing the maid at 5.30 a.m. to wash the car; making her work at all hours of the day; waking her up late at night when someone comes home late and needs feeding; confiscating her passport; not paying her wages, or keeping her wages so that she’ll have no control over her income (“She can’t control her own money, you see,” we smugly, paternalistically justify our actions to ourselves).

Last year, Braema helped to form a civic society group, The Working Committee 2, to address these issues. For close to a year, TWC2 laboured to organize a series of workshops, exhibitions and dialogue sessions – anything and everything that might even slightly transform public consciousness for the better. Part of this series included a morning session which GloPos co-organized with TWC2. Some 45 students from Victoria JC were involved, as was Neil Humphreys, a columnist with Today.

This belated 4th edition of GloPos is one result of that morning session. It consists of an essay by Lim Chi-Sharn, “No Days Off”, a companion piece to “Maids, Madams and Moralities” in our 3rd edition, in which he sets out the issue of foreign domestic workers (FDWs). Amy Lim, as well as two former VJC students, David Thian and Claire Ban, continue this theme with their pieces. Jayson Joseph Paulose reports back on a survey conducted within the college on attitudes towards FDWs, and the edition closes with a reflective piece by Cliff Andy Hartono.

Perhaps the question that many will ask about this issue is: why should it matter? Why devote a whole edition to maids? Why bother trying to change people? It seems to me that what is at stake, ultimately, is the kind of Singapore that emerges. In the final analysis, it’s not our standard of living or our GDP that matters, important though these may be. It’s about the relationships we enter into, and the importance of remembering that relationships involve human beings. She’s not just a maid.