Food contact zones and kitchen politics: migrant domestic helpers in Hong Kong

Abstract

Making and sharing food plays an essential role in foreign domestic helpers’ work and leisure life. However, this has seldom been addressed in the voluminous migrant domestic helper literature. In Hong Kong, overseas helpers are employed in over three hundred thousand households. This article explores their food experiences in both their leisure and work spaces. It first examines the “contact zones” in which these workers share food with co-ethnics. It then considers the kitchen space in which foreign domestic workers serve their employers. It shows how these domestic helpers make use of their culinary skills to secure better human relationships and gain extra bargaining power through the provision of tasty ethnic dishes. Despite the immense power imbalance between the employer and the domestic helper, such food contact has shed light on the everyday resilience embedded in kitchen politics in Hong Kong.

Keywords:

• Migrant domestic helpers
• food contact zones
• kitchen politics
• culinary power
• everyday resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An earlier version of the article was presented at the Friday Seminars at the Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong on April 10, 2018. The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

2 “Contact zones” as defined by Pratt (1992) are social spaces exhibiting diverse cultural encounters and clashes and asymmetrical power relations. The food contact zones between employers and domestic helpers in this article elaborate on the situation of unequal power relations and their subversion and transcendence.

3 The research team consisted of Sunil K.C., a research associate, at City University of Hong Kong, and research helpers at the “Asian Migrants Coordinating Body,” an organization working for migrants’ rights in Hong Kong.

4 This research focuses on the food-making experiences of the domestic workers, but observations provided some additional data on the experiences of workers vis-à-vis their employers.

5 All names in the article are pseudonyms.

6 Many local families cook Cantonese-style soup for dinner, in some cases taking hours to prepare. Also, many Cantonese Chinese prefer to eat steamed dishes, such as steamed fish and pork. Some migrant helpers told us that before they came to Hong Kong, they had already been trained by the recruitment centers in how to cook steamed dishes.

7 A number of domestic helpers stressed that “cooking is not only an art, it is also management.” Making a meal for a large number of people during festive days requires good management skills and sophisticated food knowledge. One first needs to know culinary order: what to cut, season, and cook, and then how to bring people to suitably taste the food and finish all the different dishes. Such culinary order corresponds to the digestive order. For example, light dishes should be served first, followed by heavy dishes, and there should be vegetable dishes in between.

8 Dawet duren is a sweet dish made with durian and coconut milk. Timus is a sweet snack made with grated coconut, cassava and palm sugar. Klepong is a round-shaped snack made from glutinous rice flour with molten palm sugar, and coated with coconut shreds. Onde onde is sometimes considered the same as klepong, but some see onde onde as deep-fried klepong. Wajik bandung is a kind of cake with pandan flavor.

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Yuk Wah Chan

Yuk Wah Chan is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong. She has published widely on international migration, crossborder governance, food and identity. She also studies death space and practices in Hong Kong.