Page 78 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

THE MAID IN CHINA 65
missing the food, dialect and life-style of their southern hometowns, these high-ranking
Party cadres resorted to bringing women from their villages—including both single and
married women—to Beijing to provide domestic services for them and their families,
cooking, cleaning and baby-sitting (Zhu 2000). The Wuwei baomu maids were thus among
the earliest migrant women, known in general as dagongmei (working sisters). Between
the pre-1949 period to the 1970s, there were around 3,000 women from Wuwei
working as maids in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai and other metropolitan areas (Wang
Xinping 1996).
The use of baomu in Beijing in the Maoist era was not a widespread phenomenon and
was mainly limited to two types of families: the families of high-ranking Party cadres from
Wuwei and Anhui who had been relocated to big cities, and the families of senior scholars
(gaoji zhishi fenzi) who were used to the southern ways of life, and thus, like the Party
officials, resorted to importing maids from hometowns in the south. Most of these maids
were paid quite small wages, although it was the convention that employers usually took
care of the maid and her family by providing regular material assistance. It was not
uncommon for a maid to spend many years in the family, to form emotional bonds with
the children they nursed, and to end up becoming a de facto family member. During the
1960s and 1970s, the decades of political movements and ‘class struggle’, baomu became a
signifier of oppression and exploitation of the proletariats by the ‘decadent bourgeoise’ or
‘capitalist roaders’. Having a baomu in one’s home could be incriminating evidence against
cadres and senior scholars during the era of Cultural Revolution, and, as a result, most
baomu were sent home (Liu 1998). A small number of maids, however, stuck with their
employers ‘through thick and thin’ during times of political turbulence and continued to
work for their disgraced employers.
Qie Ruigu, now a 96-year-old, is one such maid. Qie was a native of Hebei Province.
Newly widowed, she went to Beijing in 1953 to look after the children of a couple called
Qu and Wang, both senior cadres in the Ministry of Engineering. When her employers
were transferred, initially to Shenyang and then to Dalian, Qie followed the family in
spite of her desire to stay close to her hometown in Hebei. During the Cultural
Revolution, the couple, due to their ‘murky past’ (they had worked undercover for the
CCP before liberation) were denounced by the ‘proletarian rebels’ and sent to a reform
camp in a remote farming area. Qie was told by the Red Guards to wake up to the fact
that she had been exploited and that she should cut her ties with the couple accused as
‘spies’. She defied the pressure and continued to look after the children of the wronged
couple. As Qu’s health deteriorated due to constant and severe beatings by the Red
Guards, Qie took on an additional role as his nurse and carer. Qu and Wang were
rehabilitated in 1976, the year in which their maid Qie turned seventy. Qie, now in her
nineties, survived her employer Qu. She lives with the three generations of the family,
and presides over family affairs as the most respected and loved elder (Wang Shuchun
2001:9).
Although a product of socialist collectivism, the Wuwei baomu embodied some
paradoxes that were to continue into the market economy. Like Qie, most maids in the
Maoist era were recruited into the families of ‘revolutionaries’, and, by rendering
domestic service to the state officials, they made a contribution to the collective goal of