Page 82 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

THE MAID IN CHINA 69
employs her. Increasingly, the use of domestic help, together with a big apartment, a
passport, or a car, has become a sign of affluence. While many hire part-timers to do
housework they cannot easily do themselves, a growing number of middle-class families
are hiring maids mainly because they are available and affordable. Zhang, a retired senior
journalist in Shanghai, hires a maid to clean her apartment and do some caring for her
elderly mother. Single, she spends most of her day dabbling in the share markets. She told
me that with the improvement of housing standards, most of her friends have moved to
new apartments around 100 square metres in size. With a bigger apartment comes more
cleaning. Since maids are available and so cheap, why not get someone to clean the apartment
4
once a day for as little as 3 to 5 yuan an hour? Her story is echoed by Mr Mi, a young
university graduate now working in a computer shop. He and his flatmate are both young
and single and do not require much help with housework, however, they get someone in
once a day, because ‘it is so cheap’, particularly if they are from Anhui. 5
There are a number of ways in which the maid is seen to have been clearly objectified
through this ‘branding’ practice. Akin to a consumer product, she is usually described and
defined in terms of her origin, not her individuality, although qualities such as ‘being hard-
working, competent, and being good with children’ are arguably related to the maid as an
individual rather than to her origin. This is indeed a paradoxical situation. On the one
hand, the maid is employed to provide domestic service, and the quality of her work is
contingent on her being a caring, professionally competent and socially responsible
person. On the other hand, the popular definition of who she is does not in any way take
into account her agency nor describe her subjectivity. In this sense, the discursive strategy
of naming or ‘branding’, a crucial exercise of ‘sort[ing] persons into the hierarchically
arranged categories of a moral order’ (Anagnost 1997:100), is seen to have validity not only
with regard to the governance of the state, as Ann Anagnost observes, but also to the
operations of the market.
The practice of ‘branding’ the service provided by the maid by referring to her place of
origin is also a powerful reminder of the disparity and stratification between regions and
provinces, and the subordination of those ‘peripheral places’. In other words, ‘Wuwei
baomu’ or ‘Sichuan mei’ as they are referred to in Beijing, or ‘Chifeng baomu’ in Tianjin, are
more than just an apt description of the maid and her origin; more importantly, these
terms connote the subordination of these peripheral places to the metropolitan centre,
including Beijing, Shanghai and other what I call ‘internal global cities’ in China. As I
discuss in detail elsewhere, ‘Anhui’, as part of the elaborate urban myth, is consumed
both as a territorial space whose poverty has conditioned the cultural practice of the
Anhui maid, and as an imaginary place whose accessibility, marketability and
‘authenticity’ emerge not in spite of, but because of, the poverty of the region (Sun,
forthcoming). The ‘Wuwei baomu’ or ‘Sichuan mei’ or ‘Chifeng baomu’ is seen as a
metaphor for the gendered, unequal and uneven relationship between Anhui, Sichuan or
Inner Mongolia and metropolitan places such as Beijing and Shanghai, and as such she
features prominently both in popular cultural representations and popular consciousness.
Mobile, abundant and available any time, the baomu is not only useful in that she provides
material, practical service to urban families; she is also discursively useful, since she
embodies the enduring potency of the metaphor of poverty. The ‘baomu from X or Y