Page 77 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

64 WANNING SUN
in general, has dramatically altered the cultural landscape of Chinese cities, little
work—with a few exceptions (for example, Jacka 2000; Chen et al. 2001; Zhang 2001)—
has been done to consider how the subjectivity of both migrants and locals has been
reworked and transformed as a result of mobility. This chapter is an initial attempt to
address this gap, by looking at the experiences of the baomu at three levels. I will discuss
her life and work at the material level; examine her movements from one place to another
and survey her work, living conditions and everyday practices. Integral to this account of
her physical movement is a discussion of her experience at a symbolic level through an
analysis of the production and consumption of popular images of the baomu and of her
place of origin. I also consider the experience of the baomu at a metaphoric level; that is,
the ways in which she ‘travels’ through successive ‘regions’ in the (re)formation of her own
subjectivity, in response to both the change in her material life and the ways in which she
is imagined in popular perceptions.

Baomu and the servants of the revolution
Working as a maid, doing menial household chores such as baby-sitting, washing, cleaning
and cooking in someone’s house, is perhaps one of the oldest professions in history. It is in
fact one of the few options of paid employment available to women in times when most
women were home-bound and immobile. As early as the Qing Dynasty, some well-to-do
Beijing households were employers of laomazi (meaning ‘old woman’, referring to the
maid, who may or may not be old) from Sanhe, a rural area in Hebei Province, which was
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known as a sending zone for maids to Beijing. By 1920, there were as many as 2,000
women from adjacent areas and regions working as domestic servants in households inside
the concession areas in Shanghai (Chi 1999:7). Nannies and maids are also common to the
European experience (for a study of nannies and maids working in affluent English homes
in the Victorian era, see McClintock 1995).
In the case of China, the routine and widespread practice of paying domestic servants to
do household chores arose during the last two decades. The nationwide trend of rural
women becoming domestic servants in the city can be traced back to a group of
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entrepreneurial women from the villages of Wuwei, Anhui Province. The history of the
‘Anhui maid’ starts long before the beginning of economic reforms. A rural area
northwest of the Yangtze River in central Anhui, a largely rural province in eastern
central China, Wuwei was well known in the history of the revolutionary era. A
stronghold of the New Fourth Army led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during
the War of Resistance against Japan (Zhongguo Renkou 1987:72), it was also the
headquarters of its 7th Division (Zhang 2000:1). One narrative dates the entry of the
Wuwei maids into Beijing to as early as before 1949, when, courtesy of their connections
with these CCP revolutionaries, the first Wuwei women left their village homes for
Beijing to work as domestic servants (Wang Xinping 1996). Another narrative points to
the founding of the People’s Republic of China as the beginning of the Wuwei maid
phenomenon. According to those holding this view, revolutionary veterans who were
native to Wuwei and the surrounding region were rewarded with important government
positions in Beijing for their contribution to the new republic. Settled in Beijing yet