On an average Sunday afternoon, it looks as though the 100,000 Filipinas working in Hong Kong have all descended on Statue Square, the center of Hong Kong. The vast majority of these women don't work in clubs like those of Wan Chai, but in homes of families with young children working as domestic servants. They obtain two year contracts in the Philippines that cost them as much as three months of the salary they earn in Hong Kong. Initially these domestics communicate with their Hong Kong Chinese employers in English. The domestics care for the children of young working couples, learn to make the family's favorite meals, and eventually to converse in Cantonese, some better than others.
It's lonely for Filipinas working as domestic servants in Hong Kong since there isn't a significant population of Filipino men and some look to other women for companionship, even intimacy. Filipino sailors have a unique name amongst some of these women we spoke with, "never mind." Sailors have a reputation for having brief sexual encounters with women in port and then leaving them, so these women we spoke with said that when a Filipino begins talking to them and they learn that he is a sailor, they say "never mind" and walk away. Indian men are said by some of these same women to prey on Filipinas, and we saw several couples consisting of one of these domestics and an Indian man as we walked the streets of Hong Kong. In one store we heard a Filipina employee refer to her older Hong Kong Chinese employer, perhaps twenty years her senior, as "daddy." In Visayan (a Filipino dialect), "daddy" is an affectionate term for a husband.
These domestics, or maids, are frequently college graduates who make more money in these unskilled jobs in Hong Kong , than they would using their degrees in the Philippines.
Because they are foreign workers, they are sometimes subject to abuses. One Filipina, who work a typical six-day work week, described to us how she had to fight to maintain the few vacation days, Sundays included, that her contract had stipulated. She would extend her trip to the market to provide goods for her boss as a way to turn the chore into a work break, and would secretively do other things to resist the demands made upon her by her employers. All this to finance her children's education back home in the Philippines. Others send money home to their parents or siblings, invest in personal property, or purchase electronic equipment like televisions, VCRs, and stereos but rarely do they invest in their own futures.
The popularity of cellular phones in Hong Kong was illustrated to me by the scene we came upon while walking home from a night market in Kowloon one night where in front of a restaurant there were about six different men talking on cellular phones. On the way to the airport in Beijing, Karen looked across the road at a taxi cab where both the driver and the passenger sitting in the seat next to him were speaking on different cellular phones. Karen wondered if they could be speaking to each other.
The popularity cellular phones in Hong Kong and China, like that of beepers in America, may have grown from the quality of phones in China, the lack of privacy in both overcrowded areas, and the difficulty finding a phone in Hong Kong that is available, but cellular phones have long since stopped being merely a device with an important utility because now they are an important symbol of social status. On the Hong Kong subway which is the quietest place for crowds of Chinese people the relative silence is typically broken by the sound of a cellular phone ringing. We were in a crowded, long-term bus in the lower Chang Jiang (Yangzi River) with mostly poor Chinese men and one obviously richer man who was talking very loud on his cellular phone as if to make sure that everyone else on the bus new he was someone wealthy enough to not only have someone that had a phone at the other end, but could afford to have a cellular phone himself. In Beijing at the Holiday Inn, the most upscale Holiday Inn we have ever seen, a man let his cellular phone ring and ring. When he finally picked it up it didn't look like he was really talking to anyone, but pretending instead to be using the phone because he was holding it up to his ear and looking at it but not talking for quite some time. At a fairly quiet restaurant in Hong Kong, a loud obnoxious man began screaming into his cellular phone as if he was the only one in the restaurant. He eventually left the restaurant, apparently due to poor reception, but when he returned he made no effort to apologize to the others in the restaurant.
Within the space of a few moments, an attractive young woman working as a clerk in a souvenir shop in Hong Kong spoke perfect English to us, Mandarin to a tourist from Taiwan, and Cantonese to her boss. She told us she could speak Japanese as well - she had spent five years studying that language - which she used when dealing with Japanese customers. We spoke with another shop clerk in a Beijing antique shop who also spoke perfect English and said that she had a college degree in business. Both of these women were intelligent, obviously possessed the necessary language skills to deal with foreigners, were very adept at the business of selling, and aspired to open up their own shops, but lacked the capital to do so. Even in the West their access to capital would not be so free flowing because they were both very young, but they were aspiring.
We had a brief conversation with the Hong Kong clerk about relationships. Something led to her saying that women were the bosses in a Chinese relationship between men and women and asked her boss, a woman, to support her view which she did. I disagreed and said that I thought the man is the boss until he gets older when the woman becomes the boss. She tactfully amended her earlier statement as if to avoid disagreement, a typical East Asian attribute, by saying that once a woman marries a man she becomes the boss. Then she totally changed direction by asking my wife if I ever beat her. "No," was the answer (-what if I had and she had told her yes!?). Then she asked if American beat their wives. "No." Then we side-stepped to say that it does happen but we believed it was rare and was socially unacceptable. When she heard this, she deemed American men to be "gentlemen," and then casually asked Karen to find her an American husband.
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