Foreign Maids and Beauty Queens

Abstract

Every Sunday is ‘maids’ day off’ in Hong Kong, when Filipina domestic workers gather en masse in the city’s Central District. These public gatherings have become a well-known phenomenon in Hong Kong, with thousands of migrant women occupying the financial district from morning till sundown, sprawling out in front of high-end boutiques and building makeshift temporary houses from cardboard boxes. The weekly event is at the centre of social life for migrant workers and has given rise to a wide range of amateur performance practice, including choreographed dances, street catwalks and beauty pageants. For Hong Kong residents, however, such leisure activities contradict the rationale for tolerating the presence of foreign maids, whose labour is needed but needed out of sight. The excess of Filipinas performing out in the open is a highly visible transgression for a Hong Kong public that would prefer these undesirable bodies to remain invisible.

In the context of Hong Kong’s exclusionary politics of labour migration, the amateur performances of Filipina domestic workers are a cultural and a site-specific practice of diasporic identity that create a public presence for an otherwise invisible migrant workforce. As amateur performers, every Sunday Filipinas counter their common experiences of servitude and contest racialized conceptions of Filipina identity as naturally inclined towards domestic work. The amateur labour that such performances entail offers a different experience of work and time for Filipinas, producing distinct embodied ways of doing politics that claim a place outside the domestic realm. These cultural practices invite us to consider the stakes of amateur performance under conditions of duress and prompt us to examine the link between amateur performance and domestic work as particular forms of labour affected by relations of value production.

Notes

1 Migrant domestic workers of other nationalities have also been gathering in specific locations of the city for years, though few of the gatherings approximate the crowds at Central. Following closely behind Filipina domestic workers the second largest group of migrant domestic workers is from Indonesia. They congregate in Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, as well as in Kowloon Park and near Kowloon Mosque. Women from India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka also gather in parks and gardens in the Kowloon area, where many of their employers live. Women from Thailand and Malaysia are more likely to be found in the area surrounding Central, along the waterfront parks near the Central Post Office and Blake’s Pier. (Constable 2007: 2)

2 The most expensive building in the world at the time it was completed in 1986, the HSBC building was designed to symbolize reassurance in Hong Kong as the epicentre of capitalism during the run-up to the 1997 handover of sovereignty to China.

3 Domestic workers often receive verbal warnings for ‘obstruction of public spaces’ – 1,858 were issued in 2017 alone (Benitez 2018) but clearly such warnings do little to stop the women from gathering.

4 In Singapore, for instance, Filipina domestic workers mainly gather in and around a large shopping centre (Lucky Plaza) with ‘no sitting’ and ‘no picnicking’ rules strictly enforced (Koh 2007: 89); in Kuala Lumpur, Filipinas populate a small secluded dead end area created by a narrow street just outside St John’s Cathedral, gathering along the sidewalks and edges of monsoon drains (107).

5 For a list of household rules see Constable (2004).

6 Tadiar is referring to activities of enjoyment more generally but amateur practice is certainly among them.

7 On the notion of prelude in amateur activity see Palladini (2017).