Page 83 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

70 WANNING SUN
place’ is a brand name, a product, whose cachet, authenticity and desirability is made
possible not in spite of, but precisely because of the popular perception that these places
are ‘poor’. In this sense, the association of these places with poverty operates on a
metaphoric level—Anhui or Sichuan is like a maid in the scheme of the national economy
—as well as on a metonymic level: the maid stands for Anhui or Sichuan. In other words,
the association of the region or province as a place with the body of the maid from that
place in the popular consciousness brings to light the complexity of what Massey refers to
as the ‘geometry of power’ (1993:59).
Indeed, the Wuwei, Sichuan or Chifeng maid is in constant circulation in the national
economy in both a bodily and a symbolic sense. However, this ‘consumer item’ can only
gain its ‘currency’ through the desire of the consumer—a socially upwardly mobile group
that hires the maid—to see these places as fixed and frozen in their poverty, and therefore
able to continually supply products that are mobile, cheap and always ready to serve the
metropolitan centre. Finally, the ‘branding’ of the maid serves to differentiate the
‘upmarket’ products, such as Beijing or Shanghai baomu, from ‘downmarket’ products,
such as baomu from Anhui and other poor provinces.

Between the state and the market

The start of the flow of the baomu from villages in the province to metropolitan cities in the
1970s and early 1980s was a response to, and dictated by, the logic of supply and demand
of the market economy. As the story of the Wuwei baomu suggests, most baomu during
this period got their jobs through informal networks, either through the introduction of
their previous employers or via the recommendation of other baomu to prospective
employers. However, the baomu market grew rapidly in the 1980s, with both prospective
baomu arriving in the city en masse looking for work and an increasing number of
employers looking for domestic assistance.
This growth created the need for a more direct and institutionalised access to the baomu
market, whereby both prospective employers and baomu could come into contact and
‘pick and choose’. Consequently, public places in the city, such as the triangle corner of
Chongwen District in Beijing, for instance, have become a ‘black market’, where
prospective employers and maids meet, negotiate and reach an agreement. This mode of
recruitment may be a cheap and quick way to those eager to strike a deal, since verbal
agreement is all that matters and requires no papers, bureaucratic formalities, or
contractual agreements. It also means, however, that neither the employers nor the baomu
are protected from potential problems. Employers may find, only too late, that they have
invited an unwelcome guest into their house. Urban tales abound, for instance, about the
maid ‘doing a runner’, taking valuables and even the baby with her. Inexperienced women
may also realise, upon arriving in a new home, that the employers may be unreasonable,
exploitative or even abusive. Again the urban press perennially publishes stories of
unsuspecting maids being treated inhumanely by employers. Police blamed the existence
of these ‘black markets’ for people trafficking and the recruitment of prostitutes.
By the mid-1980s, the social problems caused by the baomu phenomenon became so
widespread that the state decided to intervene in the baomu market. In 1983, Beijing’s