Page 76 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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The maid in China
Opportunities, challenges and the story of becoming modern

Wanning Sun

Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of Chinese rural labour migrants have left
home to seek work in the prosperous rural areas and cities of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC). This trend towards internal migration has continued unabated, with
villagers going to the city (jin cheng), domestic maids or sex workers going south (nan xia),
and inlanders journeying to the coast—all of them seeking work and income. Among
many employment options taken up by rural migrants, becoming a maid, one of the most
menial and lowly paid jobs, provides opportunities for many rural women to enter the
labour market in urban spaces. She is often referred to as baomu (‘nanny’ or ‘the maid’),
and her work has diversified to include cleaning, cooking and baby-sitting; she works on
either a casual, part-time, full-time or live-in basis. In this chapter, I show that the baomu,
or domestic workers as they are now officially called, were among the first social groups
to leave their village homes to seek work in the city since the start of economic reforms in
the late 1970s. In doing so, the baomu maids have precipitated the unstoppable nationwide
rural-to-urban migration of the 1980s and 1990s.
I will also show that as both the object to be ‘civilised’ and the subject who aspires to
be modern, the maid embodies the contradictory and unequal process of becoming
modern. For this reason, I argue that the story of the baomu provides effective empirical
evidence for us to start problematising and unravelling the complicities between gender,
power and the modernisation process in China. My discussion of the baomu is, in other
words, premised on the assumption that studies of mobility—both social and spatial—in
the era of modernisation need to take into account the variegated, unequal and necessarily
gendered nature of mobility. Whether she is called baomu, ayi (aunty), or domestic
worker, the maid, humble as she may be, is a threshold figure, negotiating the boundary
between the private and the public, and between the state and the market. As such, she is
a figure fraught with tension and ambiguity at the intersection of gender, class and
geography.
In spite of her enduring capacity to capture the urban imagination (the story of the
baomu has become an enduring media narrative in popular culture), the baomu has not yet
received much academic or scholarly attention, unlike her international counterparts—
domestic workers from the Philippines, for example (Constable 1997; Parrenas 2001). A
number of reasons may have contributed to this lack, including, most importantly, a
tendency in migrant studies projects to privilege patterns and motivations of migration.
Consequently, although the movement of baomu, and rural and labour migration in China