Page 79 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

66 WANNING SUN
the socialist state. In order to do that, the maids had to be prepared to leave home and
perform menial domestic tasks in the homes of ‘revolutionary heroes’ of the socialist era.
To be sure, the desire of the state officials to have a sense of ‘home’—including having the
comfort of eating food from home and hearing dialects from home—is understandable
and well justified; however, the acquisition of their comfort and a feeling of being at
home—both material and cultural—is premised upon women of another class leaving
their own homes. In other words, the baomu can be seen to be an unsung heroine in the
grand narrative of socialist construction. Her contribution to the socialist project,
however, not surprisingly, went unrecognised. Moreover, during the socialist era, the
humble maid became a figure of contention, caught in the cross-fire between political
factions within the party-state.

Wuwei maids and the pioneers of rural-urban migration
At the onset of the economic reforms in late 1970s, some Wuwei women, thanks to the
historical connections between Wuwei and Beijing, were quick to see a niche
employment market. Capitalising on the reputation of the ‘Wuwei maid’ in the pre-
reform era, some Wuwei women left home and went to Beijing. With one Wuwei maid
come many followers, and within a couple of years, a number of villages in Wuwei
acquired a name as ‘baomu villages’. By 1993, as many as 30,000 Wuwei women were
working as baomu. Other statistics (Ma and Xiang 1998) indicate that as many as one-third
of Beijing’s maids come from Anhui. Another survey (Dutton 1998) confirms this finding:
among 329 service persons questioned in Beijing, 30.4 per cent of them come from the
southern province of Anhui and as many as 71 per cent of these Anhui women come from
one village. Interestingly, while Xiaogang Village, Fengyang County in Anhui is well
known to have experimented with the ‘family land responsibility system’ in the late
1970s, which led to the nationwide economic reform in rural areas (Sun 2002a), it is not
generally known that it may have been the humble maids from Wuwei who pioneered
rural-urban migration at the start of the economic reform period (from 1978). By taking
the first step of leaving their village homes and seeking paid employment in the city, these
women embarked on a journey to become ‘modern’, and in doing so, irreversibly if not
single-handedly, precipitated the rural migration which changed the landscape of urban
China.
The physical mobility of the Wuwei baomu often goes hand in hand with her social
mobility. Like many other rural migrants in China, once she has made the decision to
leave home, she typically embarks on a journey of self-development. It is common for a
village woman to come to the city as a baomu and then acquire skills and basic literacy As
she becomes better informed about her options and opportunities in the city, she may
become self-employed or even an employer herself. Zhao Yuemin is a noted example. In
early 1980s, Zhao, born and brought up in a village in Wuwei, followed the footsteps of
her mother and grandmother who worked as maids and went to Beijing. However,
although initially she worked as a maid, Zhao was determined that the family history of
service as a maid would end with her. While cleaning, cooking and looking after the
children of her employer, she enrolled in part-time studies and learned modern